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FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON - CHICAGO - DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



Fundamental Questions 



BY 
HENRY CHURCHILL KING 

AUTHOR OF 

" THE LAWS OF FRIENDSHIP " 

"RATIONAL LIVING" 

ETC. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1917 

All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1917, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1917. 

\ 



FEB -I 1917 



Ncrtooot) i^rrss 

J. 8. CuBhing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.B.A. 



^0 ^CI.A'J55.386 



'Vtof* 



PREFACE 

This volume aims to deal, in not too technical 
fashion, with some of the most fundamental ques- 
tions, theoretical and practical, which are involved 
in the Christian view of God and the world. It 
is naturally intended, thus, both to answer diffi- 
culties and to suggest lines of thought which 
may help to confirm and to clarify Christian faith. 

Its chapters take up in order the perennial 
problem for all ideal views, — the question of 
suffering and sin ; the difficulties for any religious 
view which gather around prayer, — the central 
relation of revelation and response between God 
and men ; the question of how we may best think 
of Christ, - — the central fact of the Christian reli- 
gion ; and then, in the light of these conclusions, 
four large problems for Christian thought and 
life : the questions of life's fundamental decision, 
of life's fundamental paradox of liberty and law, 
of Christian unity, and of Christianity as a world 
religion. 



VI 



PREFACE 



Each of the last four questions, as well as the 
first three, are truly fundamental and vital. The 
question of life's fundamental decision has to do 
with those basic will-attitudes which chiefly give 
to life its reality and meaning and value. The 
kinship of religion with all earnest living can be 
here discerned. The question of life's funda- 
mental paradox of liberty and law is necessarily 
involved in man's use of his will, and its solution 
is requisite both for the satisfaction of man's 
reason, and for his ethical and religious freedom. 
Every life has this paradox constantly to face. 
The question of Christian unity refuses to be ig- 
nored, and probably no other generation has seen 
so much definite effort for the unification of Chris- 
tianity. It concerns us all to estimate values and 
measures aright at this point. Moreover, the 
question of Christianity as a world religion, the 
Christian church must frankly face, both for 
the justification of its world-wide missionary en- 
deavors, and to meet the demands made upon 
it by the complex modern world in this time of 
world-shaking war. There is a very real sense in 
which Christianity as a world religion is on trial. 

Parts of this volume have been printed before, 
but nothing is included that is not believed to 
have vital connection with the theme. Thanks are 
due to The Biblical Worlds The Pilgrim Teacher^ 



PREFACE vii 

The Constructive ^arterly. The International Re- 
view of Missions, and The Expositor, for permis- 
sion to use material which has appeared in their 

pages. 

HENRY CHURCHILL KING. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN— THE 
PERENNIAL PROBLEM FOR ALL IDEAL VIEWS 

PAGE 

I. Preliminary Considerations . . . . i 



1 . The three realms of reality 

2. The universality of the problem 

3. Suffering in the animal world . 

II. The Prerequisites of Moral Character 

1 . Some genuine freedom of volition 

2. Some power of accomplishment 

3. An imperfect developing world . 

4. That men should be members one of another 

5 . A sphere of laws 

6. Some element of struggle .... 

III. Help from the Common Deeper Life of Men 23 

1. The smallness of man's view . . . -25 

2. Added light upon the trend of the world's devel- 

opment .... 

3. Man's faith in immortality 

4. The four common views of suffering 
(i) Suffering as punishment for sin 

(2) Suffering as discipline 

(3) Suffering as necessary to save men from 

simple prudential selfishness . . 38 

(4) The majesty of God 41 



3 

5 
7 

12 

13 
16 

17 
18 
20 
21 



29 
31 
34 
35 
36 



X CONTENTS 

PAGE 

IV. The Christian Implications of Man's Nature . 43 

1 . Man made for heroic achievement ... 45 

2. Life deepens through opposition ... 46 

3. Man made for personal relations ... 47 

4. The joy of redeeming work .... 48 

5. The greatest sufferers not the most unhappy 49 

6. Growth of love through fellowship in suffering . 5 1 

7. Suffering the key to life's most precious experi- 

ences 51 

V. Light from Christ 54 

1. Christ's suffering has proved vicarious . . 55 

2. This suggests that all suffering may be made 

vicarious ....... 58 

3. Suffering can be turned into voluntary sacrifice, 

and so become an instrument of joy . ' . 59 

4. The suffering of Christ, as a power against sin 

also 61 

5. The suffering death of Christ, a revelation of 

the heart of God 63 



CHAPTER II 

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER— THE HEART 
OF RELIGION, DIFFICULTIES CONCERN- 
ING PRAYER 



I. Difficulties Connected with a Supposed 
Scientific View-point .... 

1 . No doubt of men's need of a sphere of law 

2. But no eternally self-existing laws 

3. No doubt of man's need of God 

4. No compelling reason to deny access of God to 

human minds ..... 

5. Man, as the goal of evolution 

6. Prayer fits human nature .... 

7. Are not narrowly to fix the scope of prayer 



66 
66 
67 
67 

68 
70 
70 
72 



CONTENTS xi 



II. Difficulties from a False Conception of 
Prayer 

1 . The idea of a prayer gauge 

2. God knows what I need .... 

III. Difficulties from the Supposed Improba 

BiLiTY OF Prayer . 

1 . God is ; we are 

2. We need God . 

3. All men impelled to pray . 

4. The example of the best . 

5 . Christ's own practice, example, and urging 

IV. Difficulty from the Lack of a Felt Pres- 

ence and Response in Prayer . 

1 . God known through his self-manifestations 

2. Relation to spiritual world compared to relation 

to physical world 

3. Even in closest personal relations, no literal 

transfer of thought .... 

4. God, no mere occasional factor in life of men 

5. God's relation to men should be unobtrusive 

6. What kind of answers to prayer really to be 

desired 

V. The Difficulty of Intercessory Prayer 



75 
75 

n 

81 
82 
82 
82 
83 
83 

85 
86 

87 

88 
90 
90 

92 
94 



CHAPTER III 

THE QUESTION OF CHRIST— THE CENTRAL 
FACT OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION: 
HOW ARE WE TO THINK ABOUT CHRIST? 

I. The Best Life 97 

II. The Best Ideals and Standards ... 98 

III. The Best Insight into the Laws of Life . 99 

IV. The Best Convictions loi 

V. The Best Hopes 102 



xii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

VI. The Best Dynamic for Living . . .103 

VII. The Best Revelation of God . . .105 

CHAPTER IV 

THE QUESTION OF LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL 
DECISION 

I. Drifting or Steering in 

II. Domination by Feeling or by Rational 

Purpose 112 

III. Loyalty or Disloyalty 113 

IV. Following One's Conscience or Not . .114 
V. The Surrender or Not, to the Scientific 

Spirit 115 

VI. The Larger Life or the Lesser Good . .116 

VII. Wilful or Obedient 117 

VIII. Following Duty or Pleasure. . .118 

IX. Taking On or Refusing the Will of God . 119 
X. Deep-going Ethical Decision, even without 

Religious Faith 121 

XI. The Love of the Father or the Love of 

the World 123 

XII. Selfish or Unselfish 128 

XIII. Disciple of Christ or Not . . . .129 

CHAPTER V 

THE QUESTION OF LIFES FUNDAMENTAL 
PARADOX— THE QUESTION OF LIB- 
ERTY AND LA W : THE LA IV OF LIBERTY 

I. The Fundamental Nature of the Problem. 133 
II. Why this Problem Constantly Recurs . 137 



CONTENTS xiii 

PAGE 

III. The New Testament Solution of the Prob- 

lem 144 

IV. The Relation of the Christian Solution of 

THE Paradox to Other Theories of Life 148 

V. Modern Examples of the Paradox . -153 

VI. The Achievement of True Freedom . .163 



CHAPTER VI 

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY -^ 
THE CONFESSION OF CHRIST 

I. The One Uniting Word is Christian . .171 
II. Temperamental Differences .... 174 

III. A True Organic Unity 176 

IV. Uniformity Not Desirable . . . .177 
V. Complete Uniformity of Belief and State- 
ment Impossible . . . . . .180 

VI. Complete Uniformity of Belief and State- 
ment Undesirable 183 

VII. Our Real Unity in Our Common Life in 

Christ 186 



CHAPTER VII 

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIANITY AS A 
WORLD RELIGION I: CHRISTIANITY 
THE ONLY HOPEFUL BASIS FOR 
ORIENTAL CIVILIZATION 

I. The Need of an Adequate Spiritual Basis 

FOR Any Civilization 191 

II. The Increasing Sense of Need of a New 

Spiritual Basis for Oriental Civilization 194 



xlv CONTENTS 

PAGE 

III. The Necessary Threefold Test of the Re- 

ligious Basis of a Modern Civilization . 199 

1. Neither the Emperor cult nor Shinto can meet 

these tests 200 

2. Nor can Buddhism or Confucianism . . 200 

3. Nor a new religious syncretism . . . 202 

IV. Only Christianity Can Meet These Tests, 

and Furnish an Adequate Spiritual 
Basis for the Modern Civilization of 
the Orient 205 

CHAPTER VIII 

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIANITY AS A 
WORLD RELIGION II: CITIZENS 01 
A NEW CIVILIZATION 

I. Faith in the Possibilities of a New Civili- 
zation 216 

II. The Special Obligations Now Resting upon 

America and Americans Youth . . .221 

III. The Demands of the New Civilization . 224 

1 . The inescapable grip of the laws of God in the 

life of nations 224 

2. The needed reinvigoration of the life of the 

nations in its entire range .... 229 

3. A new grasp upon the principle of the organic 

view of truth and of human society . . 236 

4. The new civilization must be frankly, definitely 

Christian 239 

(i) The sifting out of the true from the false 

Christianity ..... 239 

(2) The abandonment of the philosophy of the 

state as above moral law . 242 

(3) A league of nations to enforce peace . 247 

(4) Further plans for a permanent peace . . 247 

IV. The Appeal to American Youth . 249 



FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 



FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

CHAPTER I 

THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN — 
THE PERENNIAL PROBLEM FOR ALL 
IDEAL VIEWS 



Preliminary Considerations 

One questions hts right to take this theme 
at all, for two reasons : First, because only 
experience of life can fitly interpret it, and 
without some depth of experience discussion 
of this dark problem is little else than mock- 
ery. One doubts the adequacy of his experi- 
ence, and his capacity to see and feel deeply 
enough to justify discussion. One would 
not further darken counsel on this subject 
by words without knowledge. The second 
reason for hesitation is just because the prob- 
lem is so old. It is in truth man's perennially 
darkest problem — the question of the ages — 



2 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

that seems to confront him with the constant 
and often-stated dilemma : either God is 
good and not omnipotent, or he is omnipotent 
and not good. No one of us can escape this 
challenge. In some form it concerns us all, 
whether our primary interest is religious or 
scientific or practical. At some point we all 
need an assured conviction of the essential 
rationality of the world — that aims that 
compel our respect are ruling in the world. 
Is it at all worth while to discuss anew this 
age-long problem ? 

If, in spite of this double misgiving, and with 
no feeling that I have new and startling light 
to shed upon it, I am undertaking once more 
a sober survey of this most difficult problem 
of human existence, it is simply because even 
the oldest questions inevitably change their 
form with changing times, and so need to be 
reconsidered again and again ; and because it 
is precisely in wrestling with our largest and 
darkest problems that our most fruitful in- 
sights are likely to come. A comprehensive, 
even if sober, resurvey of all that is involved 
in the problem of evil, natural and moral — 
in the question of suffering and sin — ought, 
then, to prove of some value, especially when 
this problem is being pressed on us all anew 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 3 

by the terror of the Great War. And this, 
in spite of the fact that one has no expectation 
of solving the problem. It probably was not 
intended that complete demonstration should 
be possible to us here. One can only hope to 
give a series of suggestions that may help to 
faith, suggestions which themselves can be 
of weight chiefly to those who can interpret 
them out of their own experience. 

I. From the start it is well to remember 
that we can know beforehand that there 
can be no demonstration of the reasons for 
actual matter-of-fact existences. We can- 
not demonstrate mosquitoes or snakes or 
potato bugs. We cannot demonstrate the 
grass or the grub or the bird. The concrete 
facts can never be fully reached and the 
necessity of their existence shown by any 
philosophy or any summary of principles, 
however widely accepted. The most that 
we could do at this point would be to agree 
on certain great ends that ought to prevail 
in any universe; to infer from these the 
probability of some larger necessary laws 
(although many so-called laws, especially in 
the physical world, are doubtless not primal 
necessities at all, but only widely prevalent 
matters of fact) ; and then to show that the 



4 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

existence of various matters of fact is not 
inconsistent with these ends and laws. 

It was long ago pointed out that reality 
has for all men three realms — the realms 
of the is, of the must, and of the ought; and 
we cannot have any hope of final unity in 
our thinking, except as we start from the 
ought. Quite aside from any ethical interest, 
the very meaning of these three realms of 
reality is such that we plainly cannot derive 
the ought from the is or the must. That a 
thing is does not prove that it ought to be. 
Nor even that a thing must be, does it follow 
that it ought to be. We might have to regard 
it as an evil necessity. We mean something 
quite different when we say a thing ought 
to be, from what we mean when we say it 
is or it must be. If we are to get any final 
unity in our three realms of reality, then, it 
can only be by starting from the ought, pro- 
ceeding to the must, as involved in the ends 
contained in the ought, and accepting the 
is as merely actual, not demonstrable, but 
also not inconsistent with the ought and the 
must. Our metaphysics, thus, as Lotze and 
Paulsen and Wundt all contend, must root 
in our ethics if we are to be able at all to 
believe in the final unity of the world. This 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 5 

initial consideration — the necessary primacy 
of the ought for any unity in the world or in 
our own thinking — is itself good reason for 
faith that purposes of good do rule in the 
world, that there is love and not hate at the 
world's heart. 

2. There is a further preliminary consid- 
eration that may give us hope as to the final 
issue of our problem. The very fact, as I 
have elsewhere pointed out, that all men, 
practically without exception, feel somewhere 
the problem of evil — the difficulty of the 
sufi*ering of the righteous, of the prosperity 
of the wicked, of much seemingly needless 
suffering — as well as the increasing sensi- 
tiveness at this point, itself shows that all 
men instinctively feel and make the universal 
assumption that a really rational world must 
be a world that is worth while, a world that 
can justify itself to a sensitive and enlightened 
conscience, a world that is not merely coldly 
logical but warmly loving. The fact that 
men so universally make this assumption 
is itself good evidence that we may believe 
that the world will finally justify that assump- 
tion. 

For men are themselves a part, the last 
evolved part, and at least a very important 



6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

part of that world which they are seeking 
to understand. They are, indeed, that part 
of the world in which the world itself has 
come to consciousness and to intelligent judg- 
ment. If their universal assumption is that 
this world must be a good world, as well as a 
logically consistent world, if it is to be truly 
rational and tolerable at all, then if that 
assumption is not justified, the world has 
contradicted and condemned itself in its 
own highest product, and there is an end of 
rational thinking. For you cannot rationally 
think through a world fundamentally irra- 
tional. In that case, the fact of the human 
mind and the fact of the rest of the world 
do not fit, and cannot be made to fit. You 
could then only accept the universe in its 
entirety as a self-contradictory and evil 
thing, and utterly abandon any attempt 
to think it into unity. That would mean 
an end of rational thinking and of all phi- 
losophy, to say nothing of religion. And 
such a futile and chaotic outcome is itself 
a reason for faith that the contrary view, 
the view that all men assume as essential 
to a rational world, is justified. In spite of 
seeming contradictions, the world probably 
bears true witness to itself in men's instinctive 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 7 

demand upon the world and upon life. A 
controlling love, we may believe, is at work 
in the world. There is, then, some initial 
rational presumption that our problem is not 
insoluble. 

3. One subordinate aspect of the problem 
of suffering — the suffering in the animal 
world — has been much accentuated in our 
modern time, for two reasons : first, because 
with the progress of Christian civilization 
the sensitiveness to all suffering, even animal 
suffering, has greatly increased. And, sec- 
ondly, because the tendency of the Darwinian 
theory of evolution was to formulate all de- 
velopment in terms of "the struggle for 
existence," and so to seem to most minds 
to involve a terrible severity in the condi- 
tions under which life evolved, and a cease- 
less preying of animals upon one another. 

As to this whole question of animal suffer- 
ing, it seems clear to me, in the first place, 
that, even if the Darwinian theory of evolu- 
tion be fully accepted, the facts would by 
no means warrant many of the statements 
made concerning the cruelty and pain of 
the struggle. The word struggle itself — 
as applied to the whole biological field — 
tends to mislead. Surely we may well give 



8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

heed at this point to the testimony of Darwin 
and Wallace themselves, as quoted by Drum- 
mond. Darwin says : 

When we reflect on this struggle, we may console our- 
selves with the full belief that the war of nature is not 
incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally 
prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the 
happy survive and multiply. 

And Wallace expresses himself even more 
explicitly : 

On the whole, the popular idea of the struggle for 
existence entailing misery and pain in the animal world 
is the very reverse of the truth. What it really brings 
about is the maximum of life and of the enjoyment of 
life, with the minimum of suffering and pain. Given 
the necessity of death and reproduction — and without 
these there could have been no progressive development 
of the organic world — and it is diflicult even to imagine 
a system by which a greater balance of happiness could 
have been secured. 

Moreover, with continued study of the prob- 
lem of evolution on the part of men of all 
schools, it is significant that there has been 
a marked recognition that there can be no 
such exclusive emphasis upon the struggle 
for existence, but that other factors have a 
large part to play. Thus, scientists are 
themselves insisting, to a larger extent than 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 9 

when John Fiske wrote the words, that 
^'other agencies are at work besides natural 
selection, and the story of the struggle for 
existence is far from being the whole story." 
And the recognition of ^^ these other agencies'' 
greatly modifies the former impression, itself 
unjustified, of a pitiless and bloody warfare 
involving exquisite animal anguish at every 
step. In the words of Thomson and Geddes : 

There is no doubt that the general tone and treat- 
ment of Darwinism, even hitherto, has been deeply 
coloured by the acute individualism of Darwin's and 
the preceding age. We may therefore restate here 
the concluding thesis of our own Evolution of Sex (1889), 
since elaborated in various ways by Drummond, by 
Kropotkin and others. It is that the general progress 
both of the plant and the animal world, and notably 
the great uplifts, must be viewed not simply as individ- 
ual but very largely in terms of sex and parenthood, 
of family and association ; and hence of gregarious 
flocks and herds, of co-operative packs, of evolving 
tribes, and thus ultimately of civilized societies — above 
all, therefore, of the city. Huxley's tragic vision of 
"Nature as a gladiatorial show," and consequently of 
ethical life and progress as merely superposed by man, 
as therefore an interference with the normal order of 
Nature, is still far too dominant among us. 

There is, indeed, every reason to believe 
that the method of animal development 



lO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

chosen, costly as it undoubtedly is, was the 
least costly in pain ; and that, in any case, 
the goal was worth the price paid. We have 
small reason to doubt that life itself for the 
animal involves general pleasure; and the 
aim in creation seems to have been, as Lotze 
has pointed out, to crowd each least cranny 
of the world with life and the joy of life. 

The naturally growing sensitiveness to 
suffering has been further accentuated in 
our time, I must believe, by a falsely senti- 
mental view of the animal world, that has 
led us to attribute to them sufferings that 
they pretty certainly do not have. There 
has been much exaggeration at this point. 
Men have naturally enough made themselves 
the standard for judging of suffering, and 
so have forgotten that even the highest ani- 
mals have quite certainly a less sensitive ner- 
vous system than we, while the lower animal 
forms are almost out of comparison with men 
in this respect. 

Still less may we attribute to the animal 
world our mental sufferings and anxieties. 
Lacking all clear self-consciousness, animals 
suffer neither from memory nor from an- 
ticipation as do men. The popular animal 
stories have here much to answer for. One 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN ii 

feels indignant at the amount of entirely 
groundless suffering that has thus been caused 
many persons by the assumption that there 
must be transferred to the animal world suf- 
fering that is to be found only among human 
beings. There is suffering enough among 
men in any case. Gratuitously to increase 
it is inexcusable. And men need not carry 
the load that comes from the thought of 
constant mental anguish among animals. 

Moreover, one may well protest against 
such false animal psychology — glad as he 
may be to help every movement to relieve 
physical pain among animals — because the 
ascription of mental suffering to animals 
tends to draw attention away from the 
undoubted and far greater suffering of men, 
due to remediable conditions. In general, 
there is surely good reason to believe that 
pleasure in the animal world far outweighs 
pain ; and that the organic world below man 
certainly holds no presumption that a cruel, 
heedless power is dominating the processes 
of evolution. 



12 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

II 

The Prerequisites of Moral Character 

Passing, now, to our main problem — that 
of suffering and sin among men — it seems 
clear that any discussion of this question is 
useless that does not, first of all, make plain 
the prerequisites of moral character, the 
inevitable prerequisites that the world may 
be a sphere for moral training and action. 
For our whole problem is an ethical one. It 
is for moral reasons that we feel its pressure. 
The point of our doubt, indeed, is simply 
whether the world can meet the demands of 
a sensitive and enlightened conscience. Our 
very problem assumes, then, the final and 
intrinsic value of moral ends. We must ask 
from the world that it make character and 
growth in character at least possible. We 
can only play with our problem, therefore, 
if we are unwilling to make explicit to our- 
selves those prerequisites that must be ful- 
filled if the world is to be a sphere for moral 
training and action. 

I can only answer, of course, for myself. 
These necessary prerequisites seem to me to 
be six : ^ some genuine freedom of volition on 

^ Cf. Theology and the Social Consciousness^ pp. 30-32. 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 13 

man's part ; some power of accomplishment 
in the direction of the volition ; an imperfect 
developing environment ; a sphere of laws ; 
that men should be members one of another; 
and that there should be struggle against 
resistance. Now every one of these six 
prerequisites, it should be noted, involves 
the possibility of resulting suffering, and most 
of them, the possibility of sin. It is this 
paradox, therefore, which confronts us : That 
the world may be one that we can approve, 
it must contain conditions that involve the 
possibility at least of suffering and sin that 
we cannot approve. Character is an im- 
mensely costly product. We are not able 
even to imagine any way by which it can be 
cheaply produced. The degree of final satis- 
faction as to the solution of the problem of 
evil, therefore, will probably depend upon 
how deeply valuable character seems to us 
to be. If it seems to us of infinite worth, 
we shall not grudge the cost, but justify the 
process. 

I. Let us look, then, at these prerequisites, 
if the world is to be a sphere of moral training 
and action. And, first, there must be, for 
the very possibility of character in man, 
some genuine freedom of volition on man's 



14 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

part. I do not purpose to reargue the old 
question of freedom. The will seems to me 
not comparable with anything else. I only 
have to say for myself that I share James's 
feeling, that if there be no power of genuine 
initiative in man, however limited in scope 
(as in unforced direction of attention, or in 
retaining of the passing thought for an in- 
stant, or in simple approval or disapproval), 
life would be like "the dull rattling off of a 
chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.'' 
I find myself unable to conceive of character 
as a reality, or as in any vital sense uniquely 
man's own and not a mechanical product of 
outside, wholly unmoral forces, unless there 
be this incomparable power of freedom. 
Eucken's and Bergson's new emphasis on 
the will seems to me, therefore, a sane reac- 
tion from a too prevalent necessitarianism. 
I cannot see that character and moral prob- 
lems have any meaning as such, without a 
clear recognition of freedom. One cannot 
have both mechanical explanation and moral 
freedom at the same time and at the same 
point. He must pay the price of a freedom 
that is not a play-freedom but real through 
and through. That there might be char- 
acter at all, then, in the world, men must 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 15 

be not only self-conscious, but have the power 
of moral initiative. And for God this meant 
a certain divine self-limitation, and for men 
the possibility of choosing against God — 
the possibility of sin. This terrible possi- 
bility is the necessary price of free sons of 
God, who were free to choose to do his will. 

I see no conceivable way of accounting 
for error and for sin in the world without mak- 
ing God directly responsible for both, if 
genuine creative freedom is not assigned to 
man. We must be dead in earnest as to 
man's real initiative, if we are to solve the 
problem of suifering and sin. As Bowne 
says, concerning error, "every system of 
philosophy must invoke freedom for the 
solution of the problem of error or make 
shipwreck of reason itself.'' ^ James vividly 
sets forth the same difficulty as to sin : ^ 

When, for example, I imagine such carrion as the 
Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by 
which the universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily 
expresses its nature without shrinking from complicity 
with such a whole. And I deliberately refuse to keep 
on terms of loyalty with the universe by saying blankly 
that the murder, since it does flow from the nature of 

^ Theory of Thought and Knowledge^ p. 244. 
2 The Will to Believe, p. 177. 



i6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

the whole, is not carrion. There are some instinctive 
reactions which I, for one, will not tamper with. 

On the completely deterministic theory, every 
fact, however horrible, must be regarded as 
a necessary step in the development of the 
universe ; in other words, from the religious 
point of view, God is absolutely and directly 
responsible. If, then, we are to be able to 
keep our faith at all in the broad rationality 
of the universe, we must assume man's real 
freedom. 

2. Nor could there be denied to man, 
with volition, some power of accomplishment 
in the direction of his volition ; though this 
involves the possibility of suffering on his own 
part and on that of others. This power 
of accomplishment may be decidedly limited, 
but it must be there. To grant man a mere 
resultless volition must be felt to be, as Lotze 
suggests, ''sophistical." Some results of our 
volition are needed to make our act real and 
to reveal the character of it even to ourselves 
and to others. Man's whole being calls 
for such expressive activity, if there is to be 
any ''realizing sense" of the meaning of inner 
states. This, then, is one answer to the 
natural question. Why was not the world 
so made that only good designs could be 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 17 

carried out, or that evil volitions would be 
at once frustrated ? The volition is truly 
revealed only in the light of its logical conse- 
quences, and the worst of these are in the 
realm of personal relations. A world in 
which that was impossible would seem, then, 
to be no fit world for the moral training of a 
finite developing creation. Ethical consider- 
ations must decide here. Life cannot be a 
play. It can certainly be no farce. Both 
God and man must be in dead earnest with 
the fact of freedom. 

3. An imperfect developing world, there- 
fore, in the sense of a world in which many 
things may occur, because of men's choices, 
which in and of themselves ought not to be, 
is needed for the development of moral char- 
acter in man. Even those other natural 
irnperfections that belong to an earth in pro- 
cess probably make an actually more suit- 
able environment for a creature developing 
toward character than a world conceived on 
more final lines. An imperfect developing 
world is fitted to an imperfect developing 
man. The imperfect here is the more perfect. 
Such a world calls out man's powers, chal- 
lenges him to achievement, stimulates him to 
moral purposes, trains him in moral action. 



1 8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

4. But it may be felt that while doubtless 
the granting to a man of resultless volition 
would be sophistical and futile, at least the 
results might be confined to the man himself. 
And it is with this difficulty that the still 
more fundamental fourth prerequisite of a 
moral world has to do : that men should be 
members one of another. Of the fact there 
is no manner of doubt. Ought it to be a 
fact ? 

Now It is quite conceivable that men might 
have come into being quite independently of 
one another, and be in as absolute isolation 
as Leibnitz' "windowless monads/' or as the 
chemical processes going on in a multitude of 
utterly disconnected test-tubes. It would be 
a more than Robinson Crusoe-like existence, 
with no personal relations either in memory 
or in vaguest anticipation ; though a shadowy 
kind of purely individualistic morality would 
be still conceivable. In such a world the re- 
sults of the processes in one individual could 
not in the least extend themselves to others. 
Would it be a better world, a world that we 
ourselves would prefer ? 

We can at least see that all that we most 
prize in this world would be absent in that, 
even though certain evils would have van- 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 19 

ished also. Such a world could not be prop- 
erly called a universe at all. There would 
be as many absolutely independent worlds 
as there were individuals. Unless relations, 
at least of knowledge, were admitted, there 
could apparently be no significant enlarge- 
ment of life. There would be no need by 
one life of another, and no possibility of 
service. All the possibilities of personal rela- 
tions — of friendships — would be cut off. 
Love would have no meaning; and, indeed, 
so far from being the sum of virtue, it could 
have no existence. Anything that could 
conceivably be called a moral universe, with 
all the infinite and endless significance that 
that fact contains, would have utterly ceased. 
That would seem to be the world we must 
have, if we are to insist that results of an 
individuaFs conduct are to be confined to the 
individual himself. 

In other words, the very possibility of such 
a moral universe, as we know and feel the 
need of, demands that we shall be members 
one of another, knit up indissolubly with 
other lives, with all that that involves. 
But in such a world the results of conduct 
must register themselves chiefly in personal 
relations. Where wrong choices are made, 



20 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

we can cause and be caused suffering. Those 
personal relations in which lie the most 
exquisite joys of life contain inevitably like 
possibilities of pain. Sin thus necessarily 
carries suffering with it, even the suffering 
of the innocent. The world is not a play- 
world. But it should be remembered in 
exactly this connection that this very fact 
of our inevitable membership in one another 
is one of the greatest of all restraints from 
moral evil, and one of the greatest motives 
to good. 

5. Once more, that the world may be a 
sphere of moral training and action there 
must be a sphere of laws in the structure of 
the world, on whose operation men may 
steadily count. Such a sphere of laws is 
not only not opposed to freedom, but is 
necessary to give to freedom any field of 
action ; for the possibility of all growth and 
accomplishment in knowledge, in power, and 
In character depends upon it. This implies 
that character is a becoming, a growth, an 
accomplishing on the part of each individual ; 
and cannot possibly be inherited or passively 
received. It can realize itself only as it 
sets worthy goals and works toward these 
goals. But such a sphere of laws — while 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 21 

it alone can save us from the wild chaos and 
resultlessness of a lawless world — does neces- 
sarily involve also the possibility of much 
suffering, and of suffering not due to sin, prop- 
erly so called, but to ignorance of the laws 
of nature. Such suffering is not properly 
to be regarded as punishment, or as "sent 
by God." It needs, as LeConte says, only 
knowledge of and conformity to law. 

6. And finally, as to the prerequisites of 
moral character, we know no way of growth 
in character that does not involve struggle, 
resistance, repeated choosing of the right 
against the solicitation of the wrong. This 
is quite in line with the psychological fact, 
that man is made, in every fiber of his being, 
for action; that his ideas and ideals become 
truly his, only through increasingly complete 
expression of them in work. And the im- 
perfect developing world of which we have 
spoken, on this very account, becomes a 
peculiarly good world for moral training. 

So that we may well believe with Martineau 
that even "the ills of life are not here on their 
own account, but are as a divine challenge and 
Godlike wrestling in the night with our too 
reluctant wills." This need of struggle and 
resistance seems to be an inevitable law of 



22 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

life. Growth and discipline of character re- 
quire it. And it is this law that Browning 
makes the old rabbi so effectively voice : 

Then, welcome each rebuff 
That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go ! 
Be our joys three parts pain ! 
Strive, and hold cheap the strain ; 
Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge 
the throe ! 

For thence, — a paradox 
Which comforts while it mocks, — 
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail : 
What I aspired to be, 
And was not, comforts me : 

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' 
the scale. 

Must this necessity of struggle and resist- 
ance be still called a psychological defect 
in our natures ? The question may indeed 
be raised. But once more it seems fairly 
clear that, so far as human insight is able to 
go, one is obliged to conclude that if the con- 
ditions were otherwise, it would be only a 
play-world in which we live ; that character 
is too stern a thing for one pleasantly to 
drift into ; and that a good that could be so 
achieved would seem to us too cheap a goal, 
quite unworthy of our steel. The heroes, 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 23 

some one has insisted, are those who can 
stand the world as it is. 

It is hardly too much to say that the whole 
solution of the problem of evil depends pri- 
marily upon a proper estimation of the pre- 
requisites that are necessary to the develop- 
ment of moral character. For the man who 
clearly sees what those prerequisites are, 
and what possibilities of suffering and sin 
they involve, and who believes at the same 
time in the infinite value of character, will 
find in these very facts a comprehensive 
answer to his questioning. 

Ill 

Help from the Common Deeper Life 
OF Men 

In attempting frankly to face the perennial 
problem of evil, we have been dealing hitherto 
with what might all be called preliminary 
considerations, in order to be sure that the 
sweep and conditions of the problem itself 
were correctly conceived. For there is plainly 
no cheap and easy solution of this question. 
Men have been universally occupied with it 
through the centuries, just because there 
are so many phenomena that seem to deny 



24 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

a purpose of love in the world. No mere 
reexamination of individual phenomena, then, 
will meet the case. We must make plain 
to ourselves that personal character is the 
only aim that will finally satisfy our thought ; 
and we have seen that that goal, in the na- 
ture of the case, carries with it large possi- 
bilities of sin and suffering. We might ex- 
pect, therefore, to find in the world many 
facts that would seem to deny a God of love. 
The solution of our whole problem lies funda- 
mentally just here. 

But it is abundantly worth while to see 
that there is a mass of corroborating evidence 
that may confirm our faith in the goodness 
of God. We have already found that cer- 
tain important and practically inevitable 
trends of our natures encourage the hope 
that the problem is not insoluble. And there 
were reasons to believe, too, that the partic- 
ular fact of animal suifering raised no insu- 
perable difficulty. 

With the present section we turn to seek 
such help as may come from the common 
deeper life of men. For there are certain 
great considerations that have made a uni- 
versal appeal to men who have had some 
depth of moral and reflective life. And 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 25 

they are considerations that deserve still 
to weigh with each individual, wrestling 
anew with man's darkest problem. 

I. First of all, it has probably never 
escaped thoughtful men that their vision 
was greatly limited. The smallness of man's 
view cannot be ignored. The facts surveyed, 
the region within their knowledge, the data 
in any way at their command, were all too 
severely restricted to make an adequate 
judgment possible. Sometimes this has been 
asserted in humble faith, and sometimes 
in skeptical rebellion ; but, whether in one 
way or the other, men have had to own 
that they did not have sufficient data to 
judge the ways of God. It has remained 
always possible that a few additional facts 
would quite change the seeming of things. 
We cannot judge the building, men have 
habitually urged with themselves, while the 
scaffolding is up. The world is too large, time 
and space too great, for our reach. Moreover, 
the world is In process ; we can judge it only 
in the light of the final goal. 

Does this consideration still deserve to 
weigh with thoughtful men to-day ? There is 
a curious passage in Lotze's Microcosmus,^ 

1 Vol. II, p. 716. 



26 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

in which, in a fashion, he seems to turn this 
attempted answer into a further objection, 
in his desire to deal with utter honesty with 
the problem of evil : 

It may be said that evil appears only in particulars, 
and that when we take a comprehensive view of the 
great whole it disappears ; but of what use Is a consola- 
tion the power of which depends upon the arrangement 
of clauses in a sentence ? For what becomes of our 
consolation, if we convert the sentence which contains 
it thus : The world is indeed harmonious as a whole, 
but if we look nearer it is full of misery ? 

But one wonders if, after all, this would not 
be a bit too ingenious, if it were intended to 
set aside the help coming from the consider- 
ation of the smallness of our view. So under- 
stood, it would certainly be inconsistent with 
some of Lotze's own deepest convictions. 
For example, he reminds us elsewhere that 
the view-point does make a vast and inevi- 
table difference. Wherever purposes are being 
worked out at all, there one must have, for 
any final judgment, knowledge of the ends 
sought. And so we find him saying : 

Only if, standing in the creative centre of the 
universe, we could fully scan the thought whence it has 
sprung, could we from it foretell the destinies of the 
individual called to contribute to its realization ; this 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 27 

we cannot do from our human point of view that brings 
us face to face not with the Creator and His purposes, 
but only with the created. . . . We stand neither in 
our knowing nor in our acting at the motionless centre 
of the universe, but at the farthest extremities of its 
structure, loud with the whirl of machinery ; and the 
impatient longing that seeks to escape thence to the 
centre should beware of thinking lightly of the serious- 
ness and magnitude of conditions under whose sway an 
irrevocable decree has placed our finite life.^ 

And indeed, he is himself inclined to urge 
this necessary modesty of our speculation 
as a chief consideration in what we may say 
concerning the problem of evil : ^ 

I have never cherished an assurance that speculation 
possesses secret means of going back to the beginning of 
all reality, of looking on at its genesis and growth, and 
of determining beforehand the necessary direction of 
its movement; it seems to me that philosophy is the 
endeavor of the human mind, after this wonderful world 
has come into existence and we in it, to work its way 
back in thought and bring the facts of outer and of 
inner experience into connection, as far as our present 
position in the world allows. 

It is natural, therefore, that he should urge : ^ 

Let us therefore alter a little the canon of Leibnitz, 
and say that where there appears to be an irreconcilable 

1 Microcosmus, Vol. I, pp. 388, 400. 

2 Op, ciL, Vol. II, p. 717. 

3 Op. cit,y Vol. II, p. 717. 



28 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

contradiction between the omnipotence and the good- 
ness of God, there our finite wisdom has come to the end 
of its tether, and that we do not understand the solution 
which yet we believe in. 

I cannot doubt, myself, that we may still 
well emphasize with ourselves the smallness 
of our view. Even in judging human con- 
duct, we find how often our appraisal has 
been utterly changed by the knowledge of 
a few additional facts, or by some further 
glimpse into intentions. How much more, 
even without explanation, might one reason- 
ably conclude that in judging the ways of 
God his highest wisdom would be, like the 
patriarch of old, to lay his hand upon his 
mouth and keep silence. 

Moreover, if this consideration ever de- 
served to weigh with men, one might think 
it deserves to weigh still more now. The 
world has been so infinitely enlarged for our 
time, by modern science, in space and in 
time and in energy, that humility never 
more became men. I wonder increasingly 
whether an illustration of my own old theo- 
logical instructor was exaggerated after all. 
He said that an insect crawling up a column 
of the Parthenon, painfully making its way 
around some pore in the stone, was as well 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 29 

fitted to judge of the architecture of the 
Parthenon as we, of the infinitude of God's 
plans. It may reasonably be that much 
that seems to us quite inexplicable would 
fall easily into its fit place, if only we could 
stand at the center with God and see his 
full purpose working itself out in all crea- 
tion. 

2. But modern science not only contains 
an argument for humility. In the immensely 
longer stretches of time and space which it 
opens out to men, it brings real relief to 
thoughtful souls by throwing some additional 
light upon the probable trend of the world's 
development. Similar light has come from 
a greatly enlarged historical perspective. In 
the light of evolution we can survey a far 
longer period, and can see what appears to 
be a "dramatic tendency''; and the goal 
to be achieved seems to be worth its cost. 
Evolution may thus be said to give to men 
the vision of a larger portion of the world's 
orbit in the inorganic, organic, and historic, 
and so to enable men better to estimate 
what kind of a curve it is to describe. While 
we still feel keenly the smallness of our view, 
there is given at the same time, thus, some 
added insight into the direction of the pur- 



30 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

pose of God, and so some better possibility 
of judging of the meaning of the whole pro- 
cess, and of even consciously and intelli- 
gently cooperating with God in the carrying 
out of his purposes. So John Fiske feels 
that he is justified in contending that the 
"cosmic process exists purely for the sake 
of moral ends," and in asserting "the omni- 
present ethical trend" of the universe: 

Though in many ways God's work is above our 
comprehension, yet those parts of the world's story 
that we can decipher well warrant the belief that while 
in Nature there may be divine irony, there can be no 
such thing as wanton mockery, for profoundly under- 
lying the surface entanglement of her actions we may 
discern the omnipresent ethical trend. The moral 
sentiments, the moral law, devotion to unselfish ends, 
disinterested love, nobility of soul — these are Nature's 
most highly wrought products, latest in coming to 
maturity ; they are the consummation toward which 
all earlier prophecy has pointed. We are right, then, 
in greeting the rejuvenescent summer with devout 
faith and hope. Below the surface din and clashing 
of the struggle for life we hear the undertone of the 
deep ethical purpose, as it rolls in solemn music through 
the ages, its volume swelled by every victory, great or 
small, of right over wrong, till in the fulness of time, in 
God's own time, it shall burst forth in the triumphant 
chorus of Humanity purified and redeemed.^ 

* Through Nature to God, p. 129. 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 31 

3. More important than the immediate 
help derived from either of the considera- 
tions already named is the help from man's 
faith in immortality. Indeed, it is hardly 
too much to say that we should be obliged 
to give up any solution of the problem of 
evil, if faith in immortality were impossible. 
No supposed substitutes for immortality seem 
to me at all to suffice at this point. They 
must appear only ^^ words, words," to the 
souls wrested away from a noble friendship. 
Nor does this imply an essentially pessimistic 
view of life. Indeed, one might be quite 
ready to say with Le Gallienne : "Man is 
born to be in love with life, and in spite of 
all the sorrow that life brings along with 
its joy, it is only an occasional pessimist 
here and there that becomes estranged from 
it. The saddest will usually admit that it 
has been good to live." Still, one would 
have, even in that conviction, no sufficient 
answer to the problem of evil. It is just 
because men are made on so large a plan, 
with such capacity for endless growth, that 
we do not know how to harmonize with the 
wisdom and goodness of God the abrupt 
snuffing out of their lives. The more life 
means, the deeper its joys, the more inex- 



32 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

plicable is its utter ending. The goal which 
the universe has reached in man seems too 
great and too precious, and its cost too 
inestimable, to make rational or right the 
flinging aside of human lives into the waste 
heap of the world. We cannot, then, solve 
our problem at all, if we may not keep our 
faith in immortality. It is because we can 
believe that this life is only a fragment of 
a larger whole, that we can still keep our faith 
in the love of God. 

It is a fact most remarkable, when one 
reflects upon it, that men should have main- 
tained so persistent a faith in immortality, 
in the teeth of all the appearances that 
death ends all. After all secondary explana- 
tions of this fact have been made, it remains 
remarkable and becomes itself an assurance 
of immortality. Among all peoples, and in 
all times, though with very varying estimate 
of its content, men seem to have cherished 
something of an immortal hope of another 
life. And we need still to make sure that we 
are not underestimating the help which faith 
in immortality has to give, in facing with cour- 
age and cheer the facts of sin and suifering. 

And the perfect familiarity of the sugges- 
tion is not to be allowed to hide from us the 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 33 

fact that it is no slight consideration which 
is thus brought to view. If there is another 
life at all, that simple fact greatly affects 
our judgment of present conditions. The 
present life comes then to be thought of, 
almost inevitably, as a period of training, 
of learning how to live; and we do not try 
longer to estimate it as a finality. What 
we could not defend as final, we can conceive 
as not only defensible but as having a valu- 
able function to perform, as temporary. 
And if that other life may be conceived as 
a life of still larger possibilities, fulfilling the 
best potentialities of the present life, the 
help to be gained from faith in immortality 
is yet greater. 

Now, if one really believes in a future 
life of still larger possibilities, surely the 
whole aspect of things has changed for him. 
Even in the hardest of situations, he can still 
say, "This too shall pass away''; and 

Because the way is short, I thank Thee, God. 

To the common and natural hopes of men 
concerning immortality, Christ has added 
his own explicit assurance of the future 
life and of its satisfaction to us. It is plain 
that many of our greatest sorrows would 



34 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

cease, if we really believed in the immortal 
hope ; and at least it can certainly be said 
that the way to such faith is not closed ; and 
that we have a right to use this large possi- 
bility as a part of our answer to the problem 
of evil. 

4. There is further help for us from the 
common deeper life of men. For out of it 
have developed through the centuries the 
four common views of suffering, each of 
which has some aid to give in the solution 
of the problem of evil. The four views 
have each had many advocates, and all are 
represented in the Book of Job. These views 
are : that suffering is the punishment or 
direct consequence of sin ; that it is present 
in life foV the sake of discipline or chastening; 
that without it real virtue would hardly be 
possible to men ; that there is no answer 
to the problem of suffering but the majesty 
of God. These views make some use of 
considerations already employed, but are 
suggestive in their interrelations, and as con- 
taining a kind of consensus of the thought of 
men on the problem of suffering. Concerning 
all explanations of suffering, it is to be re- 
membered that it is the suffering of the right- 
eous for which men chiefly seek justification. 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 35 

(i) The view that all suifering is to be 
considered as the punishment or direct result 
of sin is naturally one of the first suggested. 
It is the view of Job's "comforters." This 
theory tends to solve the difficulty of the 
suffering of the righteous, by denying that 
there are any righteous who could be exempt. 
The marked incongruities that the theory 
had to face in the suffering of little children, 
for example, drove men logically to extend 
the theory by the hypothesis of preceding ex- 
istences and of the transmigration of souls ; 
so that suffering otherwise unexplained might 
be referred to sins in a previous existence. 

With or without this extension, the view 
that sin brings suffering certainly has in 
part a solid basis in human experience. No 
man can deal honestly with himself and not 
know that much of his suffering has come 
through his own sin. It was natural that 
this inference from self-observation should 
be extended to others, and so an attempt be 
made to explain all suffering as due to the 
sin of the sufferer, thus relieving God of all 
responsibility. Now the theory undoubtedly 
does explain much suffering; but closer 
and wider observation of life made it impos- 
sible to regard it as an explanation of all 



36 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

suffering. There was too obviously much 
disproportion between sin and suffering, and 
much suffering on the part of the innocent 
just because of the closeness of their rela- 
tions to the guilty. And to apply the theory 
in judging others requires an intimacy of 
knowledge that no outside observer can 
have. We are no doubt justified in believing 
for all men that much suffering does follow 
directly on the sin of the sufferer; but we 
cannot safely apply the theory except to 
ourselves, and here we do well to apply it 
searchingly. One may wisely take many of 
his own difficulties as only proper punish- 
ment for previous remissness, and uncom- 
plainingly and courageously face them. 

(2) The view that suffering is to be re- 
garded chiefly as discipline, as chastening, 
justly makes a wide appeal. In Job it is 
the view of Elihu. It is commonly used to 
supplement the first view, to account for 
the suffering of those at least comparatively 
righteous. It, too, has a sound basis in 
experience. We have seen men and women 
strengthen and refine and grow under trial 
and sorrow. We have seen suffering thus 
apparently do what prosperity had failed 
to do. We know in our own cases that the 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 37 

presence of difficult circumstances has often 
brought out of us what easy times did not 
secure. Men naturally extended this theory, 
too, to try to cover all the facts. All moral 
and religious thinking has tended to make 
use of this view, and has found great help 
in it. 

And yet, taken alone, it is plainly not an 
adequate explanation of the facts of suffer- 
ing. The distribution of suifering, its inten- 
sity and duration in many cases, the lack of 
it where it seems peculiarly needed, and the 
overplus where it seems much less needed — 
such facts as these, so far as man's insight 
can go, indicate the limitations of the theory. 

And the theory has a further limitation, 
often disregarded by its defenders. After 
all, suffering in itself is not purifying, is no 
wonder-worker. The result depends on the 
individual's own reaction. As the sun softens 
the wax and hardens the clay, so suffering 
may either soften or harden, sweeten or 
embitter; it all depends on how it is taken. 
The theory, too, tends to ignore or implic- 
itly deny the helpful influence of joy as well 
as sorrow. 

All this does not forbid the thought that 
in God's intention suffering is often allowed 



38 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

for our discipline. We have already seen 
that character seems to require for its de- 
velopment a large element of struggle; and 
this makes it certain that the disciplinary- 
theory of suffering has solid justification. 
But we cannot allow that suflPering in itself 
has any magical power, or that all suffering 
IS to be explained as disciplinary. Even 
when the first and second views are com- 
bined, much suffering seems still unaccounted 
for. 

(3) The third view of suflFering, that with- 
out it virtue would hardly be possible to 
men, is the view suggested by the prelude 
of Job. This view is less immediately ob- 
vious than the two preceding views, but it 
roots in a genuine insight into what is morally 
necessary. The question really raised in 
the prelude of Job is whether there are any 
truly unselfish men of character; whether, 
after all, the seemingly virtuous man is not 
simply an example of prudential selfishness. 
''Doth Job serve God for naught.^'' the 
Adversary sneeringly asks. Does not the 
seemingly righteous and religious man simply 
see clearly that God has everything in his 
hands, and that, therefore, if man is to prosper 
he must, in mere prudence, do what God 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 39 

requires ? If this is not to be the case, 
this view suggests that neither the certainty 
of God nor the certainty of the reward for 
righteousness must be too plain. It must 
be really true that the righteous often suffer, 
and suffer many times just because of their 
righteousness. It must often seem that God 
has forgotten. Reward must not follow too 
closely or too inevitably upon the righteous 
act. The great spiritual facts and rewards 
must be obscure enough to make unselfish 
virtue possible. One needs to be able to 
believe, for himself and for others, that bare 
prudential selfishness is not the final word. 
Men need in this sense the invisible God, 
and a seeming unreality of the spiritual 
life.i 

This is a consideration strongly urged by 
Kant, and felt increasingly since his time, 
until men have come to feel that they may 
well thank God that they live in a world 
in which there is a problem of evil, a world 
in which uncalculating, disinterested love 
is possible. For, as I have elsewhere said, 
"the greatest evil, after all, would be that 
conditions of genuine character should fail." 

1 See, for further discussion of this point, the author's Seeming 
Unreality of the Spiritual Life, pp. 141-155. 



40 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

Every such true soul is a new witness for the 
reality of God and the spiritual world — 
"Jehovah's champion.'' 

"Reactions," eh ? Well, what's your formula 

For one particular kind — I won't insist 

On proof of every theorem in the list 

But only one — what chemicals combine. 

What CO2 and H2SO4, 

To cause such things as happened yesterday, 

To send a very gallant gentleman 

Into antarctic night, to perish there 

Alone, not driven nor shamed nor cheered to die. 

But fighting, as mankind has always fought. 

His baser self, and conquering, as mankind 

Down the long years has always conquered self ? 

What are your tests to prove a man's a man ? 
Which of your compounds ever lightly threw 
Its life away, as men have always done. 
Spurred not by lust nor greed nor hope of fame 
But casting all aside on the bare chance 
That it might somehow serve the Greater Good ? 

There's a reaction — what's its formula ? 
Produce that in your test-tubes if you can ! 

The significance of this third view of suf- 
fering is confirmed by all those considera- 
tions that arise from the moral necessity 
of constant respect for man's personality on 
God's part as well as on the part of his fellow 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 41 

men. There must be punctilious regard by 
God not only for a man's liberty, but for 
the inner sanctity of his being, if he is to be 
brought to the highest in character. Char- 
acter cannot come through coercion or dom- 
ination or even by prescription. There 
must be much that may seem like forgetful- 
ness and neglect on God's part, if there is to 
be that scrupulous reverence for man's per- 
sonality which man's own true victory re- 
quires. For character must be the man's 
own chosen creative act; and to that end 
the very love of God in its farsightedness 
does not intervene nor obtrude. This deep- 
going principle of the necessity of constant 
reverence for personality goes far to explain 
many puzzling things in God's dealings with 
men. 

(4) The fourth view of suffering — that 
there is no answer to the problem of suffering 
but the majesty of God — really falls back, 
in large measure, on the consideration of 
the smallness of our view, already dealt 
with. It is the view of the latter part of 
Job, and it suggests not only that the works 
and plans of God are quite certainly beyond 
our power to estimate ; but also that in 
proportion as a man comes to know God, 



42 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

and to get even a poor appreciation of his 
character, his majesty, and his infinitude, 
he will leave the question readily in God's 
hands unanswered. He can believe where 
he cannot see. 

I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear ; 
But now mine eye seeth Thee, 
Wherefore I abhor myself 
And repent in dust and ashes. 

Job's questions are not answered, but the 
vision of the majesty of God suffices to give 
him faith and patience in the face of unan- 
swered questions. This view allies itself nat- 
urally with the third view and supplements 
it by humbling man where the other exalts 
him. We are glad for all deeper insights 
into truth granted, but at the utmost we 
must own our weakness and folly in the face 
of the infinite majesty of God. 

All four of the common views of suffering 
thus have elements of truth and genuine 
help ; at some points they strike deeply 
into the heart of this difficult problem ; and 
taken together they are a worthy result 
of the travail of men's souls through the 
centuries over this dark problem. 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 43 

IV 

The Christian Implications of Man's 
Nature 

We have seen in the previous sections that 
there are some important initial reasons for 
faith in the final solution of our problem, 
and that such a faith is not precluded by the 
fact of animal suffering. The inevitable pre- 
requisites of a moral world, too, were seen 
to be such as to require the possibility of sin 
and of suffering — a weighty and far-reach- 
ing consideration. We should have only a 
play-world otherwise. We might therefore 
anticipate exactly such difficulties as we do 
find. The deeper common reactions of the 
race upon our problem, moreover, were felt 
to bring real help. The necessary smallness 
of our human view, the bearing of the race's 
faith in immortality, the further light from 
the trend of evolution, and the four common 
views of suffering, all alike have light to give. 
Much suffering is indubitably due to the sin 
of the sufferer himself. Other suffering is 
as probably due to conditions required for 
our full discipline in living. Particularly 
is it deeply true, that reward must not follow 
too closely or too surely upon the righteous 



44 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

act — that the good must often suffer and 
the wicked prosper — if genuinely unselfish 
character is to be produced. We come even 
to be thankful, from this point of view, that 
we have a problem of evil. And no doubt 
ultimately we must fall back upon the thought 
of the majesty of God. Any adequate vision 
of God makes us feel anew the smallness of 
our view, and the wisdom and necessity, 
after our best attempts to understand God's 
ways, of leaving the whole problem in his 
hands, with faith in a solution we cannot fully 
see. Now, has the peculiarly Christian view 
any further answer to our question ? Has 
Christ himself some still larger help to give ? 
This is our present inquiry. 

A series of considerations makes us feel 
that we have not yet reached the heart of 
the matter. For Christianity has made us 
far more sensitive to certain implications of 
our natures, to which the race as a whole, 
to be sure, has not been blind, but which 
have received an emphasis and setting, from 
the Christian point of view, not before pos- 
sible. Christ's teaching and life and death 
throw into strong relief certain great trends 
of our beings, and make more possible a 
positive attack upon our problem. 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 45 

I. First of all, we are impressed anew from 
the Christian view-point that man is really- 
made for action, for heroic achievement, 
for service and sacrifice — so made for all 
this that he cannot be satisfied 

With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart, 
Tame in earth's paddock as her prize. 

His very sports show that he joys in diffi- 
culties for their own sake. He seeks adven- 
ture and delights in obstacles. There is 
something in men far deeper than the desire 
for easy-going pleasure and passive self- 
indulgence. So that a moral philosopher 
like Paulsen feels compelled to say : 

Who would care to live without opposition and 
struggle ? Would men prize truth itself as they do, if 
it were attained without effort and kept alive without 
battle ? To battle and to make sacrifices for one's 
chosen cause constitutes a necessary element of human 
life. Carlyle states this truth in a beautiful passage 
in his book on Heroes and Hero-Worship: "It is a 
calumny to say that men are roused to heroic actions by 
ease, hope of pleasure, recompense — sugar-plums of 
any kind in this world or the next. In the meanest 
mortal there lies something nobler. The poor swearing 
soldier hired to be shot has his 'honor of a soldier,' 
different from drill, regulations, and the shilling a day. 
It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true 



46 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

deeds, and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a 
God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly 
longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day- 
drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly 
who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, 
abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements 
that act on the heart of man." 

The difficulties of life therefore have their 
own contribution to make to life, just as 
soon as one looks at life even approximately 
from Christ's view-point. When a man thus 
positively faces life's ills he finds in them an 
opportunity, which he would not spare, for 
a field for training and for conquest, for such 
all-round self-discipline and development of 
will as he knows he needs. He even rejoices, 
therefore, in many-sided trials and tempta- 
tions, in order that a patient steadfastness 
may ^'have its perfect work," and that he 
himself may be called out on every side, and 
be made ''perfect and entire, lacking in noth- 
ing." It is still partial defeat that one should 
be able only to stand his lot, and not also 
to be "happy in his lot." 

2. Nor are there only this many-sided 
discipline of will to be achieved and the nat- 
ural joy in such achievement. Life itself 
and joy in life both broaden and deepen 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 47 

through opposition and labor and misfortune, 
as Lotze has penetratingly pointed out : 

By the opposition which the natural course of things 
offers to a too easy satisfaction of natural impulses ; 
by the labor to which man is compelled, and in the 
prosecution of which he acquires knowledge of, and 
power over, things in the most various relations ; 
finally, by misfortune itself and the manifold painful 
efforts which he has to make under the pressure of the 
gradually multiplying relations of life ; by all this there 
is both opened before him a wider horizon of varied 
enjoyment, and also there becomes clear to him for the 
first time the inexhaustible significance of moral ideas 
which seem to receive an accession of intrinsic worth 
with every new relation to which their regulating and 
organizing influence is extended. 

This is only the use of the laboratory 
method . in life itself. Nobody is going to 
take in the sweep of the moral ideas by passive 
reception. He must work them out in the 
laboratory of life's active experiences. Man's 
very being demands it. The insistence of 
modern psychology, therefore, that we are 
made for action, serves further to accentuate 
considerations essentially Christian. 

3. The like facts that men are made not 
less surely for personal relations, and that 
the whole man can come out only in such 
relations, have other vital bearings on our 



48 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

problem. The light from Christ's life is 
here unmistakable. Whatever the initial dif- 
ficulties — given a world of sin and suffer- 
ing on the part of others — if one loves 
others, he must suffer, and he cannot but 
choose to suffer. Because we love, and in 
proportion as we love, we must suffer and 
choose to suffer. Without some such experi- 
ence of our own, indeed, we should be shut 
out from all the more significant relations 
to others who suffer. There could be other- 
wise but a shallow understanding of them 
or sympathy with them. If, then, in such 
a world one would belong in the company 
of the highest in character, he cannot choose 
but suffer. We are made on so exalted a plan 
that we cannot be wholly happy in selfish- 
ness. Even the most selfish wish at least 
the selfless devotion of some other. Some 
companionship in suffering then is necessary, 
if we are to be let into the high privilege of 
helping another in his darkest hours — if 
we are not then to be left in the outer circle 
of the uninitiated. The testing question of 
life continues to be: ''What, could ye not 
watch with me one hour .^" 

4. And it is only to souls thus willing to 
pay the price of sufi^cring that there can come. 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 49 

too, the joy of truly redeeming work. It is 
part of these very natures of ours, every- 
where knit up with other lives, that there is 
no cheap way in which this highest joy can 
be tasted. Human love would be less worthy 
than it is, were it not ready and glad to pay 
the price of the suifering involved in winning 
another to his own highest good. For joy's 
sake, as well as for duty's sake, the highest 
in character cannot excuse themselves from 
redemptive suffering. 

5. Moreover, it must stir our thought 
to see so often that it is not those who have 
suffered most who are most unhappy, or 
most at cross-purposes with existence, or 
who trust God the least. The deadly ennui 
belongs on the whole not to these, but to 
the "favored sons of destiny," whose wants 
seem all provided for and who have no struggle 
to make. Suffering, this would suggest, can- 
not quite be the unmitigated evil we are 
tempted to regard it. One suspects there 
must somehow be hidden in the heart of 
suffering some distillate even of joy — some 
cure for its own pain. This finds beautiful 
and truthful expression in a passage in Eliza- 
beth Hastings' thoughtful novel. An Experi- 
ment in Altruism. To Janet, who has been 



so FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

inclined to quarrel with life, has come a 
great sorrow in the sudden death of her noble 
lover. A friend goes to her to speak what 
comfort she can, but expecting to find her 
still more bitter than before. 

*'Do you know,'' she said, "the sorrow almost rests 
me ? I have had so much of the bitter and meaningless 
pain. Perhaps my quarrel with life is over." 

"But this is so inexplicable," I cried, taking the girl's 
hands in mine and forgetting that I was there to com- 
fort her. 

"It doesn't need to be explained, because it hurts, 
and the hurt is life, and life is good. Oh, I tell you," 
she added proudly, drawing her hands away and going 
over to seat herself by the window; "it is only when 
you are standing outside, looking at life, talking about 
it and thinking about it, that you can say it is cruel. 
When you are really living, the very hurt is glorious." 

I sat and watched the tearless face. The girl had 
been carried beyond me, out into the deeps of life 
where my words of help could not reach her. 

"I have always been trying to reason out the mean- 
ing of things," she said, turning quickly toward me, 
"and nobody even told me that it is only what cannot 
be said that makes life worth while." 

"People have tried to, Janet," I said softly, "but 
that is one of the things that cannot be told." 

"There isn't any kind of pain," she said slowly, 
"that can equal the joy of simple human love." 

I forgot my rebellion of the night before. I bowed 
my head in the presence of this power for whose better 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 51 

apprehending we covet the very agony and pain of life. 
We follow swiftly to let even its shadow fall upon us, for 
if ''in its face is light, in its shadow there is healing too." 

6. There is still another human experi- 
ence in these personal relations that suggests 
that suffering is no dumb, barren, brute 
fact without any ideal message. That fact 
is the repeated experience of the special 
grovi^th of a true and high love, through 
fellov^ship in suffering, in the sharing of 
burdens. It is not only that suffering seems 
many times a thing to rejoice in, because it 
reveals our friends and God ; but that the 
very sharing in the common suffering pecu- 
liarly draws souls together. Whatever the 
explanation, the fact remains. And the deep- 
ening love is rightly felt to be more significant 
than the suffering by which it was purchased. 
This fact is an intimation, once more, that 
the deepest draughts of joy even are not to 
be found in unmixed and easy pleasure ; that 
harmony is more than melody and unity 
than simplicity. Man's nature is too broad 
to make it possible to satisfy him without an 
admixture of self-giving love, and he glories 
in the cost of such love. 

7. This holds not alone in the realm of 
personal love. It seems indeed to be in 



52 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

general true that life's most precious experi- 
ences are open to us only through suffering. 
Here, again, whether we can explain it or 
not, a life seems to us shallow into which 
small experience of suffering has come. We 
cannot, with our eyes open, choose it 
either for ourselves or for those we love. 
George Eliot has laid her finger on one reason 
for this common human experience, and men 
have turned often to these words of hers 
just because they rang so true : 

We can indeed only have the highest happiness, 
such as goes with being a great man, by having wide 
thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world, 
as well as ourselves ; and this sort of happiness often 
brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it 
from pain by its being what we should choose above 
everything. 

I always wish, myself, to couple with this 
word of George Eliot's another equally dis- 
cerning but rarely quoted word of Lotze's : 

And then there is pain, the bitterness of which is only 
intelligible by reference to the refined relations of social 
life, and to the consciousness of combined victory and 
reconciliation springing from practised ethical insight — 
pain which gives rise to innumerable feelings not easily 
expressed, and pervading our whole life like a precious 
fragrance that we would on no account consent to 
renounce. 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 53 

Here too the joy is inextricably mingled 
with the pain. To insist that one must 
be spared such pain as George Eliot and 
Lotze here describe is to insist that life should 
be a comparatively barren and futile thing — 
is to insist that one doom himself to an es- 
sentially narrow and shallow life. Obviously 
the indication here confirms our earlier reflec- 
tions on the prerequisites of a moral world. 
In such a world the bitter and the sweet go 
back to essentially the same sources. Both 
arise from the fact and meaning of those close 
personal relations in which men stand. Even 
when we are most rebellious against the scheme 
of things, nothing could persuade us to give 
up the personal relations, out of which our 
rebellion springs. 

Still another fact of our human experience 
shows that life's suflFering is seldom bare 
pain and evil. Nothing seems to men more 
sacred than certain kinds of suffering, but it 
is always suffering in which there is some ele- 
ment of sacrifice. This brings us directly 
to seek the help that may come from Christ's 
own thought and life. 



54 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 



Light from Christ 

Christianity has done most of all to bring 
the sacredness and value of sacrificial suffer- 
ing into relief. Paulsen thus cannot be said 
to overstate the case when he says : 

The third great truth which Christianity has im- 
pressed upon us is : The world lives by the vicarious 
death of the just and innocent. Whatever system- 
loving theology may have made of it, it remains the 
profoundest philosophical-historical truth. The na- 
tions owe their existence to the willingness of the best 
and the most unselfish, the strongest and the purest, to 
offer themselves for sacrifice. Whatever humanity 
possesses of the highest good has been achieved by such 
men, and their reward has been misunderstanding, 
contempt, exile, and death. The history of humanity 
is the history of martyrdom ; the text to the sermon 
which is called the history of mankind is the text to the 
Good Friday sermon from the fifty-third chapter of 
the prophet Isaiah.^ 

We need the help of the deepest facts if 
we are to read the riddle of the w^orld's sin 
and sorrow, and we are certainly close to 
earth's deepest facts in the phenomena to 
which Paulsen here calls atention ; for this 

* A System o] Ethics, p. 159. 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 55 

point of view, as he clearly recognizes, has 
grown directly out of the life and teaching 
and death of Christ. 

I. We have then one more outstanding 
fact with which we may face the problem 
of suffering and sin: ^^ Christ also suffered." 
At first sight the crucifixion of Christ seems 
only to accentuate and increase our problem ; 
for it looks as if God had forgotten Jesus 
too and allowed the evil to triumph over 
him. But the experience of humanity is 
that, as the years roll on, the fact of Christ's 
suffering and death has been the source of 
men's greatest help, as they themselves have 
stood face to face with suffering and sin. 
Already those who were as close to Jesus' 
time as the New Testament writers disclose 
with unmistakable plainness this triumphant 
view-point. They are sure that Christ's suf- 
fering greatly counts, and that it cannot 
therefore mean that God forgot him. They 
appeal thus to Christ's suffering to strengthen 
their own hearts and the hearts of their 
brethren under a like undeserved suffering. 
The books of Hebrews, i Peter, and Revela- 
tion all seek thus to stay persecuted and suf- 
fering souls. In essence their argument is 
the same : If Christ was allowed to suffer 



56 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

and die in rejection and apparent defeat, 
your suffering too, though it were equally 
undeserved, does not mean that God has 
forgotten you or his kingdom. In many 
varied forms they express it — in literal 
phrase, in analogy, in vivid pictorial presenta- 
tion, like the vision of the souls under the 
altar, and of the ^'Lamb that had been 
slain" upon the throne. Christ's suffering, 
therefore, suggests to them rather that their 
suffering, too, may count, and that they are 
thus honored in sharing in the inmost work 
of Christ. ^^ Beloved," runs a passage in 
I Peter, ''think it not strange concerning the 
fiery trial which cometh upon you to prove 
you, as though a strange thing happened unto 
you : but inasmuch as ye are partakers of 
Christ's sufferings rejoice." 

Christ's life-purpose and the cardinal prin- 
ciple of his teaching had been self-giving 
love. In the terms of such a love he inter- 
preted God and life and heaven. His king- 
dom was to come, not by force, but by trust 
in the omnipotence of such love. Were there 
any circumstances too strong for that ? Can 
it stand the world as it is ? May we trust 
God to the bitter end, even to seeming defeat 
and death with every accompaniment of 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 57 

mental agony? These seem to be the ques- 
tions involved in the crucifixion of Christ, 
and his disciples came to believe that the 
results of his suffering death justified, vindi- 
cated, and fulfilled the faith shown in his 
life and teaching; and showed in turn to 
men that they might believe that their suf- 
fering, too, could be made to count for others. 
In that great consummation they would 
have a right greatly to rejoice. Once more, 
however we explain it, the suffering death of 
Christ, conceived as the culmination of his 
life, is seen to have power to stay the hearts 
of men as has no other fact. 

The greatest gift the hero leaves his race 
Is to have been a hero. 

"The prophet," wrote Professor James in 
his chapter on the will, "has drunk more 
deeply than anyone of the cup of bitterness, 
but his countenance is so unshaken and he 
speaks such mighty words of cheer that his 
will becomes our will, and our life is kindled 
at his own.'' In supreme degree this has 
proved true of Christ. Mrs. Stowe is thus 
faithful to human nature, when she makes 
Uncle Tom, bruised and bleeding for a right- 
eous and kindly deed, turn for enduring com- 



S8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

fort only to the story of the crucifixion. And 
^'The Sky Pilot" can bring to the rebellious 
sufferer, to whom he would minister, no deeper 
word than one that goes back again to the 
crucified Christ. And as he reads in Hebrews 
the passage, ''We see Jesus for the suffering 
of death crowned with glory and honor," he 
can only add: ''You see, Gwen, God gave 
nothing but the best — to his own Son only 
the best." It must ever mean much to 
men, that something of that best, it should 
be open to them, to share with Christ. 

2. The cross of Christ thus faces this 
greatest problem of men — the problem of 
evil — with a surpassing fact. The cross 
has mightily, gloriously counted, beyond all 
doubt, in the actual history of men. It 
brings thereby a new note into the whole 
discussion ; for it suggests that all suffering 
may be made vicarious — may count for 
men. How great a change this may make 
in our point of view Professor James suggests 
in his illustration in his little book. Is Life 
Worth Living? 

Consider a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a 
laboratory. He lies strapped on a board and shrieking 
at his executioners, and to his own dark consciousness 
is literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a single re- 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 59 

deeming ray in the whole business ; and yet all these 
diabolical-seeming events are usually controlled by 
human intentions with which, if his poor benighted 
mind could only be made to catch a glimpse of them, 
all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce. 
Healing truth, relief to future suilerings of beast and 
man are to be bought by them. It is genuinely a 
process of redemption. Lying on his back on the board 
there he is performing a function incalculably higher 
than any prosperous canine life admits of; and yet, 
of the whole performance, this function is the one 
portion that must remain absolutely beyond his ken. 

Now turn from this to the life of man. In the dog's 
life we see the world invisible to him because we live 
in both worlds. In human life, although we only 
see our world, and his within it, yet encompassing both 
these worlds a still wider world may be there as unseen 
by us as our world is by him ; and to believe in that 
world may be the most essential function that our lives 
in this world have to perform. 

3. In any case, the fact that Christ's 
suffering death has so counted for men in 
all the generations since is a very direct in- 
timation that all suffering may be vicarious, 
may directly count for other lives. For all 
suffering may be turned into a voluntary 
sacrifice, and so be made an offering to God 
and our fellovi^~men, and thus have the bitter- 
ness of unmeaning suffering taken out of 
it. Matheson may thus well say : " If Thou 



6o FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

art love, then thy best gift must be sacrifice ; 
in that light let me search thy world.'' And 
Hinton, in his Mystery of Pain, says still 
more directly: ^'All pains may be summed 
up in sacrifice and sacrifice is the instru- 
ment of joy." ''The happiness for which 
we are intended is one in which pain is latent 
— not merely absent, but swallowed up in 
love and turned to joy." Now that state- 
ment seems to me to be absolutely true to 
our highest human experience. Men literally 
rejoice in sacrifices made for love's sake. 
They know no truer joy than that which 
so comes to them. If, therefore, they can 
reach a point of view whence they can feel 
that all their suffering may be, by the way 
in which they bear it, transmuted into volun- 
tary sacrifice, it does thereby become an 
''instrument of joy." In that case we might 
believe that no sacrifice was lost. For the 
highest gift we can offer to man or God is a 
self-giving love. We do not seek the pain 
and trouble of our friends, but we do prize, 
nevertheless, beyond all price, the love that 
is sacrificingly shown. And in the full light 
of the cross of Christ, we can see that we 
are praying to be delivered from the most 
precious thing in life, when we pray to be 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 6i 

delivered from the sacrificial spirit. Men 
have thought it a learned and philosophical 
thing to say that there was nothing that 
men could do for God. If God be in any- 
true sense a Father, this common statement 
must be fundamentally false. And the old 
rabbi was right in his contention that it was 
given to him to "slake the thirst of God." 

4. The cross of Christ has proved its 
power not less against the other still darker 
fact of sin, in spite of all inadequate and even 
sometimes repulsive theories concerning the 
meaning of that death. To help men to 
courage and faith, in the face of suffering, 
is itself a help against sin, a help to character. 
But the cross of Christ does more than that. 
It proves practically and directly effective, 
in winning men out of sin and into a sharing 
of Christ's own purposes. It suggests inevi- 
tably that an unconquerable, seeking, self- 
giving love is the one great redemptive force 
the world holds. It has drawn, and it still 
draws, men into a spirit like Christ's own. 
No soul — father or mother, husband or 
wife, brother or sister, or friend — can truly 
love a sinning man and not suffer in his 
sin, and carry its load. The greater the love, 
the deeper the suffering. The more stub- 



62 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

bornly the sinning man holds on his loveless 
course, the more bitter is the suffering of the 
one who loves him. There is no way by 
which the winning of such a man back to 
his best self and to his God can be made 
cheap and easy and painless. The very 
relations themselves make it impossible. There 
is only one thing that can win him, if he 
is to be won at all — the unconquerable, 
unstinted love of another, suffering for him 
and with him. This vision men have caught 
in Christ, and it has broken their hearts, 
humbled and subdued them, won their love 
and endless devotion, and dedicated them to 
a sharing in Christ's own redemptive work. 

Here too we have direct help as we face 
the fact of human sin. There is pointed 
out to us the one sovereign way in which the 
conquest of sin is to be accomplished, both 
in ourselves and in others. And a new 
great motive is brought in, to give us strength 
to bear all that suffering which is due to the 
sin of others. We may so bear it, after the 
likeness of Christ, as to make it truly re- 
demptive ; and may believe therefore that 
Hinton is justified in saying, "All our pains 
identify themselves in meaning and end 
with the suffering of Christ." In a very 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 63 

real and deeply significant sense, thus, it is 
given to us to '^'know the fellowship of his 
sufferings"; it is given us to share in, and 
to carry on, Christ's own redemptive work. 

5. But the suffering death of Christ has 
a still larger and deeper message for us. 
Our highest conception of love, our great 
and increasing tenderness to suffering itself, 
and our courage and faith in the face of suf- 
fering and sin, all grow directly out of the 
spirit and life and death of Christ. Now the 
best light on the character of God should 
come from the most outstanding and signifi- 
cant facts of the world. I cannot myself 
doubt that the great personalities of history 
are such facts, and that among these person- 
alities Christ is supreme, and therefore of 
supreme value as indicating the kind of char- 
acter we may expect to find in God. As a 
mere matter of fact, his life has thus untold 
significance. 

Moreover, there must be taken with this 
fact the further fact of Christ's own con- 
sciousness of mission from God — his sense 
that the very meaning of his life was that 
it revealed God. This ultimately means 
— what has been rightly called the great- 
est proposition of the Christian religion — 



64 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

that "God is like Christ;" that we may 
believe that there is at the heart of the world 
just such a love as Christ's, a love that 
suffers with men, unstinted, endlessly self- 
giving; that this is what is meant by calling 
God Father. If we can look at Christ in 
this way, as a true manifestation of God's 
own character and love, then we can see that 
God's relation to us is not an external one; 
that he is no mere on-looker; but that, 
because our Father, he suffers in our sin, 
bears as a burden the sin and suffering of us 
all, and cannot be satisfied so long as one 
child of his turns away in sorrow and sin. 
The cross of Christ would then drop as deep 
a plummet as we can conceive into this 
dark problem of suffering and sin. It would 
give us universally penetrating and enduring 
light. For then indeed it would be true 
that "the agony of the world's struggle is 
the very life of God. Were he mere spectator, 
perhaps he too would call life cruel. But 
in the unity of our lives with him, our joy 
is his joy; our pain is his." 

The life and teaching and death of Christ, 
as the great outstanding person of history, 
and men's experience with Christ's life, may 
fairly be said, thus, to confirm and to crown 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING AND SIN 65 

the earlier considerations, suggesting faith 
in a purpose of good in the world. The pre- 
requisites of moral character themselves were 
seen necessarily to involve the possibility 
of suffering and sin. The common deeper 
life of men suggested valuable uses of suffer- 
ing and further reasons for faith. And we 
have found man's own being involving im- 
plications that could be called prophetic 
of the full Christian view, revealed through 
Christ. The larger light coming from Christ, 
then, is harmonious with the deeper experi- 
ence of men elsewhere, and puts solid ground 
under our feet in our search for reasons for 
faith in the goodness of God, in spite of the 
facts of sin and suffering. 

We turn next to consider that fundamental 
question, which deals with the possibility 
of living relations between God and men — 
the question of prayer, the heart of religion. 



CHAPTER II 

THE QUESTION OF PRAYER — THE HEART 
OF RELIGION. DIFFICULTIES CON- 
CERNING PRAYER 

I 

Difficulties Connected with a Supposed 
Scientific View-point 

I. In the discussion of any spiritual theme 
in a generation in which the influence of natu- 
ral science has been so momentous and so 
dominant as in ours, it is hardly possible to 
ignore the initial questions that arise from the 
scientific point of view. And with reference 
to prayer, it is well to remember, there is no 
reason why we should not recognize the scien- 
tific principle of the universality (but not 
''uniformity") of law — that there is law in 
every sphere of life. There is no doubt of 
laws and of our need of them, even from the 
religious point of view. For it is plain that 
without a sphere of law we could make no 
progress in knowledge or power or character ; 

66 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 67 

that the significance of freedom itself would 
depend upon the sphere of laws through which 
that freedom could express itself; and that 
without some abiding laws in the world we 
could not even maintain our faith in the trust- 
worthiness of God. 

2. But, on the other hand, we need to make 
it clear to ourselves that there is no sphere 
of eternally self-existing laws, or laws preced- 
ing all reality. Such a conception, it should 
be plain, is really unthinkable. We need 
clearly to see that law can ^' exist" only in 
one of two ways : either as the mode of activ- 
ity of some existing reality or as a formulation 
made in the mind of some observer of the way 
in which this reality acts. It is therefore im- 
possible to speak of laws as preceding all exist- 
ence, or as having any existence of their own 
apart from all really existent beings. It fol- 
lows also that laws, as such, can do nothing. 
They cause nothing, they finally explain 
nothing. They are only our formulation of 
the way in which things act, or, in any final 
statement, of the modes of God's activity. 

3 . But, as surely as there is no doubt of laws, 
and of our need of them, so surely is there no 
doubt either of our need of God and the sense 
of his presence and power and love back of 



68 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

all the world. If religion is to exist at all, 
men need to be able to believe in a living God 
who can come into real and effective relations 
with his children, who is able to manifest 
himself to them, and able to adapt himself in 
love to their changing needs. And there can 
be no possible defense of the real rationality 
of the world if the moral and spiritual inter- 
ests are not supreme. Here religion is at one 
with every ideal interest. For all ideal in- 
terests must insist that the world cannot be 
a mere machine, but must have meaning and 
worth. Its mechanism must be subordinated 
to great rational ends. Eucken speaks the 
inevitable conviction of the religious man 
when he says : 

When, however, we put the question universally, 
showing at the same time that in ceasing to give life a 
spiritual basis we allow the purely humanistic culture 
an undisputed right over the whole field, and that this 
culture has no effective way of dealing with the hollow- 
ness and illusions of existence, then to every thinking 
man the great alternative presents itself, the Either-Or. 
Either there is something other and higher than this 
purely humanistic culture or life ceases to have any 
meaning or value. 

4. It may well be urged, too, that there is 
absolutely no compelling reason, philosophic 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 69 

or scientific, to deny the direct access of God 
to human minds. Men can hardly help rea- 
soning : We have such access to each other's 
minds, can it be that He, who made these 
minds and knows every avenue of approach to 
them, has not such access ? We can change 
the course of life of our fellow-creatures ; can 
it be that God is powerless at this point ? In 
one of his earlier works Pfleiderer naturally 
reasons to the same import : 

And why should it be less possible for God to enter 
into a loving fellowship with us than for men to do so 
with each other? I should be inclined to think that 
He is even more capable of doing so. For as no man 
can altogether read the soul of another, so no man can 
altogether live in the soul of another; hence all our 
human love is and remains imperfect. But if we are 
shut off from one another by the limits of individuality, 
in relation to God it is not so ; to Him our hearts are 
as open as each man's own heart is to himself; He sees 
through and through them, and He desires to live in 
them, and to fill them with His own sacred energy and 
blessedness. 

To deny such access of God to the human 
mind is to deny the possibility of revelation, 
to deny prayer, to deny any living contact 
with God; practically to deny that there is 
any really living concrete God at all. It is to 
go back to something very like the castHDff 



70 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

deism of the eighteenth century. It is hardly 
possible that religion should be able to main- 
tain such a view of things. As Orr says : 
''The kind of theism that remains after the 
Christian element has been removed out of 
it is not one fitted to satisfy either the reason 
or the heart.'' 

5. Evolution itself, too, seems to point to 
revelation and prayer — to a living associa- 
tion with God, in that its goal, so far as we 
can see, is man. And in man evolution has 
reached a creature in whom a new spiritual 
evolution begins, whose life is primarily in 
personal relations ; that is, in relations of 
self-revelation and faith. Man is made, thus, 
one may well feel, for revelation, for prayer. 
And it would seem a very helpless God in- 
deed who was unable to come into these rela- 
tions of self-revelation and faith and so to 
meet our deepest needs. 

6. Moreover, it is sometimes urged that 
prayer cannot be harmonized with the course 
of nature. But the objector needs to be re- 
minded that no small part, and not the least 
important part, of nature is human nature, 
and that prayer most certainly does fit human 
nature. As Professor James said long ago, 
in his Psychology : 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 71 

We hear, in these days of scientific enlightenment, a 
great deal of discussion about the efficacy of prayer; 
and many reasons are given us why we should not pray, 
whilst others are given us why we should. But in all 
this very little is said of the reason why we do pray, 
which is simply that we cannot help praying. It seems 
probable that, in spite of all that "science" may do to 
the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of 
time, unless their mental nature changes in a manner 
which nothing we know should lead us to expect. 

What so fits human nature, what Is practi- 
cally inevitable to it, is intrinsically probable. 
On the other hand, any mere machine pro- 
vision, in which answers to prayer are wrought 
into the machine, utterly fails to meet the 
moral and spiritual needs of men. Our high- 
est need, after all — the chief source of both 
character and happiness — is personal associa- 
tion. Are the divine association and response 
denied us ? If they are, then it is the simple 
truth to say, as Browning frequently insists, 
that men can be more to us than God. That 
will be regarded as an impossible conclusion. 

Now if these larger considerations are to be 
given any weight at all, it is plain that we can- 
not admit that the scientific view-point com- 
pels us to turn prayer into what is simply a 
kind of spiritual gymnastics. If religion is 
to be possible at all, the reality of effective 



72 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

relations between God and men cannot be 
denied — relations that involve actual re- 
sponse on God's part. 

7. Nor, if such effective relations are to be 
supposed, can we narrowly fix the scope of 
prayer. Doubtless in the Christian view of 
prayer spiritual interests are always put above 
temporal interests. The very proportion of 
the petitions in the Lord's Prayer makes this 
emphatic. Doubtless, too, it will be increas- 
ingly true as a man goes on developing in the 
spiritual life and grows in prayer that the 
spiritual interests will more and more take the 
lead and occupy the main place in his commu- 
nion with God. But the relation with God 
can hardly be the real and adequate and vital 
thing it ought to be, if it is on any ground to 
be assumed that one may not bring all 
things to God. I cannot doubt, here, that 
a rather mechanical conception of the world 
which has naturally come into the foreground 
of this scientific generation, has produced for 
many minds what is, after all, a bugbear of 
the religious life. The universe is not a 
machine with which nothing can be done. 
Even if we were assuming the same kind of 
finite and partial relation to the world on God's 
part that holds of men, we should hardly be 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 73 

able to infer that God's relation must leave 
him less able to accomplish results than we 
ourselves. Let us be sure that if religion has 
any rational basis at all, God is not dead or 
powerless. 

Nor is it well for us to adopt some a priori 
theory of prayer, on supposed scientific 
grounds, that would rigidly exclude all tem- 
poral requests. However sure we are that 
the spiritual interest must be the dominant 
interest in prayer, and however clear it is to 
us that in prayer we are to seek God and not 
things, we simply must pray concerning that 
which disturbs our peace ; else, as Herrmann 
has suggested, our prayer is not a really hon- 
est prayer; it does not truly represent us. 
As he says : 

Whatever really so burdens the soul as to threaten Its 
peace Is to be brought before God In prayer, with the 
confidence that the Father's love understands even our 
anxious clinging to earthly things. ... If we try of 
ourselves to get free from these, and so far do not pray 
about them, we do ourselves a twofold Injury. In the 
first place, we make our prayer dead and Insincere; 
It Is In truth not our own prayer at all, but might be 
the prayer of a man placed In utterly different condi- 
tions ; and secondly, we do not really lay ourselves 
before the God who would be sought of us as our 
Helper and Saviour ; we rather Imagine a God who has 



74 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

a kind of love for the human ideal, but has no sympathy 
for our needs. ^ 

Obviously, if our religion is to be contermi- 
nous with our life and permeate the whole of 
it, we simply cannot put all our common life 
out of touch with God. We are not, there- 
fore, to limit prayer to what we ourselves 
see that it is possible for God to do. Even in 
our human relations it would be a foolish 
child that would so limit his requests of his 
father. We are not very wise at best as to 
the possibilities in this universe of ours, and 
we need not be afraid of embarrassing God. 

On the other hand, there is obviously a 
great possible abuse of prayer in pressing 
purely temporal requests with God. No 
personal relation can bear a dominant selfish 
interest in the things which the friendship 
may bring. It will surely not be less true 
in our relation to God that we shall utterly 
spoil the relation if we think of it as primarily 
a means to temporal results. God is no mere 
reservoir of good things, nor is prayer an in- 
fallible way of obtaining them. As Trum- 
bull long ago insisted, what men need is faith 
in God rather than "faith in prayer.'' 

^ The Communion of the Christian with God, Second English Edi- 
tion, p. 338. 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 75 

II 

Difficulties from a False Conception of 

Prayer 

Besides the difficulties which arise in part 
from certain unwarranted prepossessions due 
to a mechanistic view of the world, there are 
difficulties which arise from a false conception 
of prayer itself. 

I. It is here, it seems to me, that the 
famous proposal of a prayer-gauge (commonly 
associated with the name of Mr. Tyndall) 
lies, rather than in the field of scientific diffi- 
culties. As a matter of fact, neither the idea 
nor the term came originally from Tyndall, 
though it was through him that the notion be- 
came current. The idea amounted to attempt- 
ing to apply a gauge to prayer, in the same 
sense in which one might apply a gauge to 
steam. It ought hardly to be necessary to 
say at all that such a conception is utterly be- 
side the mark from the Christian point of view. 
Prayer, for Christ, is no force put simply in 
man's hands to be measured by the number 
of prayers or the number of persons or the 
length of time in prayer. There are no units 
of compulsive force on God to be so gauged. 
Prayer is no compulsion or command on God. 



76 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

God does not abdicate his throne and simply 
allow the human will to determine results. 
Else we should not dare to pray. We are 
many times clearly aware, even in the case of 
interests that seem very precious to us, that 
we simply do not know what results are really 
best. We dare to pray because we come to 
one who loves us, and has the infinite wis- 
dom to express that love as it may best be 
expressed. If there is prayer at all in the 
Christian sense, therefore, it is prayer offered 
always in glad and necessary submission to 
the wisdom and love of God. So that from 
the Christian point of view a prayer even for 
direct results may be "answered" just as 
truly in the refusal as in the granting of the 
specific request. And to gauge prayer in 
this larger sense would require nothing less 
than infinite wisdom. 

There is besides, of course, the practical 
impossibility of any such test as that pro- 
posed, since prayer as a spiritual force, as has 
been suggested, cannot be measured by the 
number of prayers or the number of persons 
or length of time in prayer. No measurable 
test is possible. Spiritually valued, the 
prayer of one might outweigh the prayer of 
many. And whatever previous agreements 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 77 

were made concerning the patients in a hos- 
pital that were to be prayed for and those 
that were not, the dumb desire of the patient 
himself or of his friends might well be, in the 
thought of God, as eloquent praying as the 
most elaborately voiced petitions. If there 
be a God at all he can be no mere passive 
mass, subject to the pressure of human deter- 
mination. He has, himself, infinite purposes 
of love and wisdom to work out in the world 
and in relation to men quite beyond our 
gauging in any possible mechanical fashion. 

2. A second difficulty, arising from a false 
conception of prayer, is sometimes expressed 
in the form : God knows what I need, why, 
therefore, should I pray ? 

It is interesting to see that Christ himself, 
in his own teaching, seems to argue in exactly 
the other way : "Your Father knoweth what 
things ye have need of, before ye ask him. 
After this manner therefore pray.'' Let one 
see the real implication of the objection 
here urged against prayer. God must either 
know or not know what we need. Would it 
be a better reason for prayer to reverse the 
statement of the objector and say : God does 
not know what I need, therefore I will pray ? 
Certainly we are not likely to seek help 



78 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

from a God who does not know what our 
needs are. 

Christ seems to be really arguing, in his 
teaching concerning prayer, in Matthew, 
somewhat in this fashion : We are to pray, 
not because God is reluctant and because his 
will must be battered down by incessant 
repetition — "Use not vain repetitions, as the 
Gentiles do." Nor are we to pray as a short 
cut to things, making prayer largely selfish 
and material. Our great need in every per- 
sonal relation is the need of the person himself, 
not primarily of the things that the relation 
may carry with it. We need God and com- 
munion with God. If prayer is to have any 
reality worth talking about, it must be the 
reality of a divine association, involving contin- 
uous mutual self-revelation and answering 
faith. When prayer is so personally conceived, 
it is seen to be the achievement and gift of a 
lifetime, though the simplest of things. But 
we obviously cannot drift into it. Here, too, 
the best is a growth — the growing expres- 
sion of a deep inner life, where the conditions 
of a satisfying personal relation are ful- 
filled. Christ seems therefore to be urging 
with men positively that it is because God 
knows and loves and cares, that we dare to 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 79 

pray and may pray. If he did not know, 
there would be no use in praying ; and if he 
did not love and care, we should not dare to 
pray. In all this, Christ is answering that 
inherent and inevitable need of prayer to 
which Professor James referred. Whatever 
our theories about prayer, we must pray. 
We cannot help the instinctive cry to the uni- 
verse, to any God in whom we blindly believe, 
when we are thinking of the things that deeply 
concern us. Where work to which we have 
given our life, where our intrinsic honor, where 
the friends whom most we love, are concerned, 
there we must pray. And to this need Christ 
responds. You may pray. 

One who rightly conceives the personal re- 
lation involved in prayer can hardly fail to 
realize, too, that the objection we are con- 
sidering stops in a very shallow conception 
of prayer. As in any personal relation, God 
cannot give himself and his best blessings ex- 
cept to responsive hearts. The deepest self- 
revelation can be made only to the reverent, 
and prayer is this response to God, this 
opening of ourselves to him. As surely as the 
best gifts of friendship cannot be made avail- 
able to the purely selfish person, so surely 
must there be some active response in our 



8o FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

human hearts to God's own self-revelation, 
if he is to bestow all that he would upon us. 

Moreover, because respect for the person- 
ality of another is the deepest condition of 
right personal relations, we may be certain 
that God's attitude is always that of reverence 
for the human personality. He does not 
thrust himself upon us ; he does not force his 
way into our lives. He stands at the door of 
the human heart to knock ; it is for us to open 
the door. The effective relation between God 
and men must always be a work of coopera- 
tion. And prayer is this opening of the door. 

It must also be added, of course, that the 
objection we are now considering seems to 
think of prayer as purely of the nature of re- 
quest, and quite ignores the whole great range 
of personal relations in the communion of 
spirit with spirit, quite independent of things 
asked for. Doubtless the thought that God 
knows my need and has me in his loving care, 
will keep me from urging with importunate 
anxiety requests for things concerning whose 
good I cannot be sure, and therefore may well 
affect the proportion of prayer to be given to 
doubtful requests. But it ought not to deter- 
mine the entire question of what prayer is to 
be to me. 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 8i 

III 

Difficulties from the Supposed Improb- 
ability OF Prayer 

But though certain initial difficulties con- 
cerning prayer may be thus set aside, the hu- 
man heart is concerned with the main ques- 
tion : What, after all, is the probability of 
effective relations between God and men ? 
Are we just deceiving ourselves here ? Is 
prayer a fond delusion ? Are there any spirit- 
ual forces, any relations of appeal and re- 
sponse, between God and man ? Ultimately 
we must be willing fully to face the facts, for it 
is no gain for any of us that we should be finally 
deceived. Is it easier, then, to deny the real- 
ity of prayer ? We live in an age with a ^^stu- 
pendous reliance on machinery," in an age of 
enormous material conquest, in an age in 
which knowledge of the material world is 
greatly extended, in a business, commercial, 
and organizing age. And it is peculiarly easy 
in such an age that the spiritual factors in 
life should be somewhat hidden. Let us ask 
ourselves, therefore, what the probability 
concerning prayer is. The probabilities of 
the case can perhaps be briefly summarized. 



82 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

1 . In the first place, and for myself, I cannot 
doubt that we must affirm the inherent prob- 
ability of prayer. God is ; we are. The in- 
terrelation of God and the human soul is to be 
expected. The reasons would need to be very 
strong that would set aside such inherent prob- 
ability. 

2. Moreover, we need God. All the deeper 
knowledge of human nature makes us feel that 
man cannot be satisfied simply with the finite. 
And Augustine's great word has been so fre- 
quently quoted just because it answers so 
completely to the instinctive judgment of 
men : "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and 
the heart of man is restless until it finds its rest 
in Thee." If we are to recognize the exist- 
ence of God at all, we must believe that he 
seeks our best good, and that what, therefore, 
is necessary to our highest development will 
not be denied us. 

3. Nor can we leave out of account the fur- 
ther fact that all men are impelled to pray. 
The practically universal fact of religion has 
everywhere meant prayer. Has this instinct 
no response ? John Fiske carries one's con- 
viction when he says : 

If the relation thus established in the morning twi- 
light of Man's existence between the Human Soul and a 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 83 

world invisible and immaterial is a relation of which only 
the subjective term is real and the objective term is 
nonexistent, then, I say, it is something utterly without 
precedent in the whole history of creation. All the 
analogies of Evolution, so far as we have yet been able 
to decipher it, are overwhelmingly against any such 
supposition. 

:f: :{: 4: 4: :{( ^ 4( 

The lesson of evolution is that through all these 
weary ages the Human Soul has not been cherishing in 
ReUgion a delusive phantom, but in spite of seemingly 
endless groping and stumbling it has been rising to the 
recognition of its essential kinship with the ever-living 
God. Of all the implications of the doctrine of evolu- 
tion with regard to Man, I believe the very deepest and 
strongest to be that which asserts the Everlasting 
Reality of Religion,^ 

4. It is probably not too much to say, 
either, that the best in the race have tended to 
make the most of prayer. Certainly the great 
moral and spiritual seers and leaders of the 
race have given, on the whole, emphatic testi- 
mony at this point. 

5. Christ's own practice and example here 
are still more convincing to the Christian. 
The Christian man feels that one might well 
rest the entire argument for prayer upon this 
great single fact. For if we are to regard 
Christ simply as the supreme character of the 

^ Fiske, Through Nature to God, pp. 189, 191. 



84 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

race, the man of clearest moral and spiritual 
discernment, we cannot overlook the fact 
that he was preeminently a man of prayer. 
Prayer evidently was his one great source 
of strength, of solace, and of courage. He 
flees to God. It may well be doubted whether 
any of his disciples have given sufficient 
weight to this example of Christ himself. If 
he needed such recourse to prayer, and found 
such life in it, we may be very sure that we 
need it still more. We are not likely to make 
any mistake in following Christ's example. 

It is perfectly plain, moreover, that Christ 
does not regard this communion with the Fa- 
ther as something in which he has a part where 
men have none ; for he encourages and urges 
and commands prayer on the part of his disci- 
ples. Christ's unmistakable example and 
teaching suggest much more than the mere 
probability of the reality of prayer. Whether 
the matter of prayer is entirely clear to us or 
not, it evidently was an unquestioned fact for 
him. He knew. He felt that he could bear 
testimony out of his own experience, and the 
testimony is the expert testimony of a master 
in the realm of the moral and spiritual. If the 
revelation of God in Christ means anything, it 
surely means the reality of prayer. 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 85 

IV 

Difficulty from the Lack of a Felt 
Presence and Response in Prayer 

Perhaps the difficulty that is most felt by 
those trying to find their way into the reli- 
gious life is what they take to be the lack of 
a felt presence and a definite response from 
God in prayer, such as they feel that they ob- 
tain in relation to the outer world or to 
another person in the body. The complaint 
is of a sense of seeming unreality, that seems 
to them quite different from what they ex- 
perience in these other relations. 

Concerning this really comprehensive diffi- 
culty, it is to be said, first of all, that there is 
no doubt that God's relation to us is not in- 
tended to be an obtrusive relation — a rela- 
tion that forces itself upon us and from the 
sense of which we are unable to escape. As I 
have elsewhere argued, the very possibility 
of moral choice on our part, and of a normal 
development in the moral and religious life, 
seems to require that God should sacredly 
respect our freedom and not make his rela- 
tion to us an obtrusive or dominating or ines- 
capable one. We need here imperatively 
the invisible God. And this consideration 



86 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

deeply affects the whole problem. We shall 
return to it a little later. 

I. Moreover, it is to be said that God must 
be known like any other personality, through 
his self-manifestations. If we are right in 
thinking at all of a God immanent in the whole 
universe, these self-manifestations must be 
manifold : in the constitution of nature, in 
our own natures and experience, in human 
history, in the touch of other lives, and par- 
ticularly in the great personalities who have 
seen and lived most truly. 

The religious man may well remind himself 
that he cannot wholly mistake the working 
of God in his historical leading of the race, 
for example, and especially as traced in the 
Old and New Testaments. If we see reason 
to believe that God was here in real relation to 
men, we ought not to find it impossible to be- 
lieve in his continued on-working through the 
generations. 

The Christian man, too, has reason to be- 
lieve not only that God has in general ex- 
pressed himself in the world as a whole, but 
that men have had the need of concrete, defi- 
nite, human, unmistakable manifestation 
already peculiarly and supremely met in the 
historical life of Jesus. As he puts himself in 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 87 

the presence of this historical hfe of Christ, 
he is likely to discover that God is able to 
find him in and through Christ as nowhere 
else. God knew our need of such a definite 
and concrete manifestation and met that 
need. With that need supremely met, the 
problem becomes one of a life of faith ; but a 
life of faith based on evidence, not without 
evidence. 

It is to be remembered also that it is hard to 
appreciate any great character and his work 
when one stands close to it. It is particularly 
true that it was impossible for men to see the 
full significance of the character and the life 
of Christ as a revelation of God, without the 
perspective of a longer time and without 
the testing of history. The full significance 
of any personality is not to be grasped at once. 
We may be sure that the law holds in rela- 
tion to Christ and God's revelation in him. 
Christ's life has gained, not lost, in signifi- 
cance, as his weight in human history has be- 
come plain. 

2. Nor is it to be forgotten that the final 
forces even in external nature, as modern 
science seems to teach us, are all unseen. 
They are not as they seem to us in the first 
testimony of the senses. The real facts con- 



88 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

cerning air pressure, the motion of the earth, 
the atomic constitution of nature, the ether 
vibrations, and many other similar phenomena, 
are not present to us in the direct evidence of 
the senses. They are reached by inference 
and experiment, and accepted by us on such 
a basis. Even the material facts, in other 
words, are not here so immediately given as 
we are in the habit of thinking. 

Moreover, our knowledge of the outer world 
through sensations is not so different from the 
knowledge of the spiritual world that comes 
through the inner data of our psychic life, as 
we often suppose. There is no immediate 
knowledge or revelation in either case. Both 
require a long time in the building up ; both 
involve comparison, memory, reason. 
Neither the outer world nor the spiritual 
meaning of our inner experiences can be given 
to us outright. There is certainly no literal 
transfer of definite thoughts from external 
nature to the minds of men. Their own inner 
activity, reflection, and inference are re- 
quired even there. And if there, we need not 
be surprised to find the same law holding in 
the realm of the spirit. 

3. Even in the closest personal intercourse, 
it is well to notice that there is no literal trans- 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 89 

fer of thought or feeling from one mind to the 
other. The self-revelation of one person to 
another cannot be made by words only, how- 
ever carefully and accurately words are used 
by the revealing personality. The words at 
best are but signs of inner mental processes, 
which the other must interpret out of a some- 
what different experience. There must be, 
thus, a creative, cooperative activity on both 
sides, and the result is quite certain to be the 
production in the second person, not of an 
exact replica of the mental state of the first, 
but only a measurable approximation to that 
state. This necessity for active cooperation 
on our part in any personal revelation sug- 
gests how impossible the common conception 
of an absolutely passive reception of a personal 
revelation from God must be. We are thus 
often expecting, in relation to God, what oc- 
curs nowhere else in our experience, not even 
in the closest personal relations. It is, in- 
deed, in this way that a truly living revelation 
from God is possible — a revelation that 
changes and grows with our growth. There 
must be, in any case, in revelation from God, 
active cooperation on our part ; and we need 
not be disturbed to find this true. It is in 
line with a true understanding of all our ex- 



90 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

perience. Even if we thought of God as 
speaking to us in definite words, these would 
require interpretation. The active interpre- 
tive element in religion is thus unavoidable. 

4. Moreover, if there be a God at all, and 
religion have any genuine justification, God 
can be no merely incidental and occasional 
factor in the life of men. If the reason of the 
case and men's needs are to be truly met, 
God's cooperation and guidance must be con- 
stant, not simply here and there by some 
marked intervention ; just as there can be no 
adequate and fundamental religious interpre- 
tation of evolution that does not recognize 
that God is essentially active at every stage 
and not alone at certain apparent breaks in 
the evolutionary series. A God who is only 
occasionally needed is no God at all. Our 
conception of divine revelation and relation 
to God, therefore, must be consistent with 
some thought of his constant activity in hu- 
man life ; though this does not mean that all 
stages of revelation are to be put on a dead 
level, any more than we are to deny the exist- 
ence of certain critical points in the evolution 
process. 

5. But, while men need the sense of God's 
constant relation to human life, it is still true, 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 91 

as was implied at the beglnnning of this sec- 
tion, that the best association even between 
men for character and happiness is not an 
obtrusive one. It should be constant, indeed, 
and intimate, but should still guard most 
jealously our freedom and our individuality, 
never desiring to force its way or its will. 
Every personal relation requires such care on 
the part of the stronger personality. It is 
preeminently necessary that this should be 
the case in God's relation to us. If our free- 
dom is not to be quite overridden and true 
moral character made impossible for us, 
God must even take pains to hide his working, 
as would a wise, strongly influential friend. 
This consideration is fundamental in its 
bearing on our problem. 

It is thus literally true to say that we need 
an invisible God. We are to walk by faith, 
not by sight. The fact seems to be that, as 
we mount higher in any sphere, our life is 
and must be increasingly one of faith. In 
the intellectual, the aesthetic, the moral, the 
religious life, we have our occasional times of 
clear vision of our goal, followed by longer 
periods when we have to go forward in faith 
in the goal once seen. As Rendel Harris 
says, we cannot avoid "the dark night of 



92 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

faith, when every step has to be taken in ab- 
solute dependence upon God, and assurance 
that the vision was truth and no lie." We 
have to learn to believe in the unseen spiritual 
forces, in the constant working of the invisible 
God. This unobtrusiveness of God seems 
then to be necessary to our spiritual training. 
There would else be such excess of motive as 
would virtually annul our freedom and our 
character. We need to learn fidelity to the 
lesser light. 

6. Another consideration deserves atten- 
tion. It is worth while for one to make clear 
to himself just what kind of answer he really 
wants to his prayers, when he thinks the 
matter through. He may find his need here 
quite other than he first imagined it to be. 
For if one is truly praying for the fulfilment 
of Christ's supreme purposes concerning him- 
self and other men, if he is truly praying the 
Lord's Prayer, the answer plainly must be 
found chiefly in life, in character. It cannot 
possibly be given simply in any kind of emo- 
tional experience, though such an experience 
in a given case may be a useful help to char- 
acter. The best and completest answer to 
a truly Christian prayer means time, growth, 
and many human choices of the right. Our 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 93 

point of view as to prayer is quite too likely 
to be low, too personal, too selfish, too much 
concerned with things and with pleasant 
experiences, instead of with the final goal of 
^^ union with the will of God." So that we 
may fail to give due weight to the most direct 
and important answers of all. 

We are, then, perhaps not looking in the 
right direction for the answers to our prayers, 
for evidence of real relation to God. Are 
there no indications that God has been at 
work in our lives, not only at the time of 
prayer and in conscious feelings that we 
seemed able to connect with the prayer, but 
in more constant and fundamental ways ? 
Have there not been the thousand diff'erent 
quickenings, glimpses, times of vision, and 
^^ sober and strenuous moods?" Have there 
been no leadings, no changed attitudes and 
longings, no altered purposes, no growth, no 
increasing assurance of spiritual things and of 
Christ's supreme significance, no enlarging 
place in our lives for the motives coming from 
Christ's life and teaching, no deepening of 
unselfish sympathy and enthusiasm for the 
great social goals of the Kingdom ? Is the 
relation to God not coming to mean more and 
more as we go on ? The fruit of the Spirit 



94 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

is the best evidence of the working of the 
Spirit of God. 

A word should be added concerning the 
difficulty many feel about intercessory prayer. 
It is not possible to doubt Christ's practice of 
intercessory prayer. The demand for it too 
is grounded in our very natures. We simply 
cannot help praying for those whom we love. 
Is there any peculiar difficulty involved in 
intercessory prayer ? As I have dealt with 
this question somewhat at length elsewhere,^ 
I may very briefly say here that intercessory 
prayer seems to me only to carry to its legiti- 
mate conclusion the well-recognized condition 
of a moral world — that we are members one of 
another. We do, as a matter of fact, condition 
one another's lives at multiplied points. May 
I through God in prayer continue to count for 
good in the life of my friend, even when distance 
or misunderstanding separates us ? It would 
seem a very impotent and inadequate God who 
would not make that true. And that it should 
be true would be only to carry through to the 
end the common law of the moral universe, 
of our constant mutual influence. If this be 
true, intercessory prayer seems to involve no 
peculiar intellectual difficulty. 

^ Theology and the Social Consciousness, pp. 164-167. 



THE QUESTION OF PRAYER 95 

In the question of suffering and sin, we were 
facing a fundamental problem for every ideal 
view; in the question of prayer, a funda- 
mental problem for any religious view of the 
world. We turn now to the central problem 
of the Christian religion — the question of our 
conception of Christ. 



CHAPTER III 

THE QUESTION OF CHRIST — THE CENTRAL 
FACT OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION: 
HOW ARE WE TO THINK ABOUT 
CHRIST? 

There is no intention, in this chapter, to go 
into an elaborate apologetic concerning Christ ; 
but rather to state as simply and directly as 
possible how the Christian man naturally 
thinks of Christ.^ 

We who call ourselves Christians take the 
name precisely because we mean to be, first 
and foremost, disciples of Jesus Christ. And 
we take this purpose on, just because, in turn, 
we believe that Christ is the supreme per- 
sonality of history, — so supreme that we 
do not know how better to describe the ideal 
life than to say, that it should be a life that 
steadily learns of Christ. 

^ The background of the line of thought here presented may be found 
in the author's Theology and the Social Consciousness, pp. 184-201, and 
Religion as Life, pp. 1 16-133. Cf. also Letters on the Greatness and 
Simplicity oj the Christian Faith, pp. 179-199. 

96 



THE QUESTION OF CHRIST 97 



The Best Life 

First of all, we believe that in Christ we 
have the best life that the world has ever 
seen. It seems to us that the great historian 
Ranke simply states the common conviction 
of men when he says, "More guiltless and more 
powerful, more exalted and more holy, has 
naught ever been on earth than his conduct, 
his life, and his death. The human race 
knows nothing that could be brought even 
afar off into comparison with it." Let one 
who is in earnest to reach for himself the 
highest character, ask himself to what other 
life he could turn for a more perfect example 
of what the highest living should be. It is an 
unspeakable gift, that there should simply 
have been such a life, and that a sufficient 
record of it should have come down to us 
through men inspired by him, so that we can 
still feel the majesty and the drawing power 
of his life. If only this one thing could be 
said about Christ, it would still justify the men 
who are in dead earnest for character in count- 
ing themselves, first and foremost, disciples 
of Christ, and in associating themselves to- 



98 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

gether that the Christlike life might more and 
more prevail among men. The Christian 
man then is first of all to think about Christ 
as the best life that the world has seen. And 
that is a most significant fact. 

II 

The Best Ideals and Standards 

But it would hardly be possible that Christ 
should have been the best life, and that he 
should not at the same time have shown to 
men the best ideals and standards, whether 
for the life of the individual or the life of the 
group or nation. Life is so inevitably one, 
that it is hardly possible to dissociate a man's 
life from his ideals and standards. The best 
life can be the best life only if it have the best 
ideals and standards. Jesus' conception of 
God as Father — as endless self-giving, sacri- 
ficial love — contains in itself the highest con- 
ceivable ideal for character, an ideal that can- 
not be denied, and one which men must regard 
as the goal for all life, individual and social. It 
is the application of this single great ideal and 
standard of Christ's that is so infinitely needed 
in all the relations of life. The Christian 
man may well emphasize, in the second place, 



THE QUESTION OF CHRIST 99 

therefore, in his witness to Christ, that Christ 
presents incomparably the best ideals and 
standards of life. 

Ill 

The Best Insight into the Laws of Life 

And the best life and the best ideals and 
standards naturally carry with them the best 
insight into the laws of life. We are coming 
to understand in our own time that the es- 
sential thing for conquest in any realm, 
whether of nature or of human nature, is that 
one should understand the laws involved, 
should know the conditions involved in those 
laws, and then by the fulfilment of those 
conditions should gain mastery of the forces 
in the realm concerned. It is thus that mod- 
ern science has made its conquest over the 
forces of nature ; it is thus that victories must 
be won in the difficult problems of human 
society. Our great social surveys are simply 
an earnest attempt to apply this scientific 
method, so successful in the realm of nature, 
to the realm of society. In like manner, 
in the realm of one's own individual life, for 
the highest victory, one needs to know the 
laws both of body and of mind, — the laws of 



lOO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

the spiritual life where our final victory must 
be won. 

Nothing is more wonderful about the teach- 
ing of Jesus than the sureness of his insight 
into the fundamental laws of life, even when 
measured by the best that modern knowledge 
has to give. He is no one-sided fanatic. 
He knows the complexity of life. He has 
clear discernment of the unity of man's spirit, 
and of the certainty with which failure at one 
point invites failure at every other, and vic- 
tory at one point helps to victory at every 
other. He sees as clearly as the modern psy- 
chologist the central importance of the will 
and action, and consequently never allows 
his conception of religion for an instant to 
lack ethical quality. He knows that the great 
reality in the world is persons and personal 
life. And just because this is true, he knows 
that the one all-inclusive law will be the law 
of unselfish love in all these relations. The 
method of his kingdom, therefore, is the 
method of the contagion of the good life 
through mental and spiritual fellowship. But 
the good life must be genuinely good. It 
must be sound and have inner integrity. 
He sees, therefore, just as clearly that besides 
mental and spiritual fellowship there must 



THE QUESTION OF CHRIST loi 

be also mental and spiritual independence on 
the part of the individual. These are simple 
illustrations of Christ's insight into the laws 
of life. The world simply does not know any 
moral teacher to whom it can go with such 
certainty of unerring insight at this most 
vital of all points. It brings great assurance 
to the learner of Christ, that he can believe 
that Christ offers also the best insight into 
the laws of life. 

IV 

The Best Convictions 

It is perhaps to say essentially the same 
thing in different words — though it seems to 
me worth saying in this different fashion — 
when one says that Christ offers to men the 
best convictions. Because great and vital 
decisions do not spring up out of vacancy; 
they must inevitably root finally in great 
convictions. The measure in which a man 
may finally count with his fellows goes right 
back to the strength and depth and signifi- 
cance of his convictions. And man has no 
more imperative need than the need of first- 
hand grip on realities ; that he should be able 
to believe with all his soul in something worth 



I02 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

believing. Now, it has been already implied 
that Christ stands for the mightiest convic- 
tions for which a man can stand : the con- 
victions of the love of God and of the life of 
love. Within these convictions are contained 
the highest ideals and hopes that men can 
cherish. There is a great new tie between 
a man and Christ when he perceives that 
Christ offers to men the priceless gift of the 
best convictions. 

V 

The Best Hopes 

Moreover, because Christ brings to men the 
best life, the best ideals and standards, the 
best insight into the laws of life, and the best 
convictions, he can bring also the best hopes. 
It is no accident that the highest hopes which 
the human race cherishes are knit up so indis- 
solubly with the life and teaching of Jesus. 
Just because the character of Christ is so 
majestic and so convincing, we give and can 
give to his teaching a weight not otherwise 
conceivable. Christ does not simply tell us 
of beautiful dreams and visions, but he does 
much more : he makes us able to believe 
in these highest hopes ; he makes us able to 



THE QUESTION OF CHRIST 103 

believe in the immortal life — in endless 
growth into the life and work of love, both here 
on earth and in the life to come; he makes 
us able to believe in the continually deepen- 
ing acquaintance with the inexhaustible God. 
The human imagination simply cannot rise 
higher in its conceptions than the hopes that 
Christ has made possible to us. This, too, 
then is a part of humanity's testimony to 
Christ : that he makes possible to men the 
best hopes. 

VI 

The Best Dynamic for Living 

And the person who offers us all this — the 
best life, the best ideals and standards, the best 
insight into the laws of life, the best convic- 
tions, and the best hopes — inevitably thereby 
brings to us at the same time the best dynamic 
for a like life. For those vital decisions in 
which character consists root unfailingly, as 
we have seen, in great inspiring convictions and 
hopes and associations, and these in the highest 
degree Christ offers. We know no surer road 
to character than the road of persistent per- 
sonal association, upon which, as we have seen, 
Christ everywhere counts. There is no cheaper 



I04 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

way. As I have had occasion often to say, we 
become inevitably like those with whom we 
constantly are, to whom we look in admiration 
and love, and who give themselves unstintedly 
to us. The supreme dynamic of life, therefore, 
will necessarily be association with the best life, 
with its best ideals and insight and convic- 
tions and hopes. We simply do not know, 
even in our modern times, any surer road for 
any man into the highest character than that 
he should put himself persistently in the pres- 
ence of Christ in the Gospels and allow the 
Spirit of God to reach him through that life ; 
to feel thus its drawing power until it becomes 
second nature to think about life as Christ 
thought about it, to feel as he felt, and to 
take his great purposes upon him in a contin- 
ually increasing response to his spirit. Be- 
yond all doubt, the world knows, in the 
experience of the centuries, no dynamic for 
the production of character in common men 
and women, for an instant to be compared 
with the influence of Christ. Least of all, 
therefore, may the Christian man forget 
that Christ has proved himself beyond all 
doubt the best dynamic for character. 



THE QUESTION OF CHRIST 105 

VII 

The Best Revelation of God 

Just because Christ is all that I have already 
said, he bears, as no other character or religion 
for an instant can bear, the severest rational 
and ethical tests of even the modern world. 
His teaching is thoroughly rational, and his 
teaching is unmistakably ethical through and 
through. We have no occasion to correct 
either his conception of life or his conception 
of God. And he becomes thus inevitably for 
us the surest revelation of God, and the great- 
est persuasive of the love of God. If we are 
to find light upon the character of God, we 
must find it in the greatest facts of the world. 
Unquestionably the great facts of the world 
are persons, and the greatest facts are the 
greatest persons ; and the supreme fact of the 
world must be the supreme person of history. 
And if even a part of what I have been saying 
concerning Christ is true, he is, among these 
greatest facts, beyond all doubt the supreme 
world-fact and person, and thereby the surest 
revealer of God. 

It is difficult to overstate the value of the 
simple fact that there has appeared among 



io6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

men a man in whom we can feel that God su- 
premely reveals himself ; so that we have our 
best conception of the character of God in 
saying that God, it seems to us, must be like 
Christ, and that to have a God with a charac- 
ter like Christ would be to have a God in whom 
the human spirit could rest. Here again, we 
know no surer road, even for the modern 
man, to come to the certainty of God and to 
rest in him, than to put himself with honest 
heart in the presence of the life of Christ, to 
allow that life to make upon him its natural, 
legitimate impression. In no way more 
surely may a man come to certainty of God 
and of relation to him, to find growing upon 
him the conviction of God and of the spiritual 
world, to feel that he finds God and God finds 
him. 

It is this great simple fact of Christ as the 
supreme revealer of God that we teach con- 
cerning Christ when we teach his divinity. 
God is like Christ. Now, we give Christ this 
supreme place only when we clearly recognize 
that he is to be made supreme within the 
Bible as well as without the Bible. No man 
is truly voicing the divinity of Christ who 
puts others — however great — on a level 
with him as revcalers of God. The great 



THE QUESTION OF CHRIST 107 

confession of Christ, therefore, may be ex- 
pressed in Luther's words: "For if we are 
certain of this : that what He thinks, speaks, 
and wills, the Father also wills, then I can 
defy all that may fight and rage at me. For 
here in Christ I have the Father's heart and 
will." Above all else, therefore, the Christian 
man will prize the fact that Christ is the su- 
preme revealer of God and the supreme per- 
suasive of the love of God. 

We call ourselves Christians, therefore, be- 
cause even in this modern time, — nay, partic- 
ularly in this modern time, for no age has 
ever needed Christ so much, — the most 
practical and certain way to righteousness of 
life, to fruitful service, to strength and 
beauty of spirit, to sacrificial love, to God, is 
Christ. 

These, then, are the great outstanding 
claims of Christ upon the love and loyalty 
of men : that in him we have the best life, 
the best ideals and standards, the best insight 
into the laws of life, the best convictions, the 
best hopes, the best dynamic for character, 
the surest revealer of God, and the greatest 
persuasive of the love of God ; and, therefore, 
"the most precious fact in history, the most 
precious fact our life contains.'' 



io8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

If we may count upon a fundamental pur- 
pose of love in the world, upon the reality of 
prayer, and upon the priceless significance 
of Christ, we are prepared to face with suffi- 
cient light the practical questions of life's 
fundamental decision, and of life's fundamen- 
tal paradox. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE QUESTION OF LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL 
DECISION 

In writing of life's fundamental decision, I 
have in mind those great essential decisions 
that themselves make and form character — 
the decisions without which life largely loses 
all meaning and value whatever. A man has 
no right to forget, either for himself or for 
all those whom he loves, the significance of 
these crisis decisions. For we certainly shall 
not drift into large achievements in life and 
work. Nervelessly waiting for something to 
turn up works no better in the realm of the 
spirit than in the realm of economics. We 
simply cannot live great lives in petty bits to 
which only our moods stir us. There must be 
great embracing decisions that cover large 
tracts of our lives, indeed that finally cover 
the whole expanse of life. As surely as the 
student needs the general purpose to attend 
all his classes, as over against the futile rais- 
ing of the question of attendance concerning 

109 



no FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

every hour, so surely in all significant living 
must there be great ultimate choices as over 
against the smaller proximate choices of 
life. 

It becomes, thus, a very serious matter for 
any man that he should not be looking out on 
life without the grip of an all-embracing pur- 
pose. It supremely concerns him that the 
preparatory years of education should not 
have closed upon him without a clear, con- 
scious, avowed determination to follow the 
highest life he knows. There is no safety nor 
promise for a drifting life. It is of these 
undergirding decisions, therefore, that I wish 
to write, clearly conscious that a man will 
be worth little to himself or to the world 
without this fundamental decision of char- 
acter. 

What are the two kinds of lives between 
which all must choose ? It is significant that 
the experience of the race has so variously 
crystallized its expression of these two kinds 
of lives. For it shows how inevitable some 
fundamental decision is. It is as inescapable 
as the omnipresence of God. It pursues man 
to his last covert, and compels him to own, 
"Whither shall I flee from thy presence.^'' 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION iii 



Drifting or Steering 

In the first place, as I have already instinc- 
tively implied, men have quite naturally and 
universally compared the two kinds of lives 
to drifting and steering. They have virtually 
asserted here the necessity that a man should 
either hold or surrender the helm of his life — 
should either have adopted some real goal, 
or have allowed himself aimlessly to drift. 
And the latter form of life has seemed to men 
essentially frivolous, the former, essentially 
earnest. That is simply to say that the first 
great decision of the earnest life must be to 
have decision in it. As Professor James says : 

If the "searching of our heart and reins" be the 
purpose of this human drama, then what is sought seems 
to be what eifort we can make. He who can make none 
is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero. 
The huge world that girdles us about puts all sorts 
of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. 
Some of the tests we meet by actions that are easy, and 
some of the questions we answer in articulately formu- 
lated words. But the deepest question that is ever 
asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning of the 
will and tightening of our heart-strings as we say, " Yes^ 
I will even have it so !^^ 



112 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

Put, now, in contrast with this dumb de- 
termined will, that common constant "eva- 
sion of life's proof" to which we all are tempted, 
that cowardly skulking around the call for 
decision, that instinctive refusal to be alone, 
quietly to think, and squarely to face life's 
facts. Life requires a choice. 

II 

Domination by Feeling or by Rational 
Purpose 

What does it mean, psychologically, to drift 
or to steer one's life ? It may be said prob- 
ably to be the difference between allowing 
one's life to be dominated by momentary 
feeling or by rational purpose. The man who 
is willing to let his course be decided in every 
case by his passing mood has evidently given 
up any rational guidance of his life. He may 
boast himself of his freedom, but he is really 
a slave of his circumstances ; for the feeling 
which he allows to determine his course is 
the immediate response to the circumstances. 
The man for whom it is sufficient reason al- 
ways to say " I don't feel like it," thereby gives 
up a man's life, and accepts the destiny of a 
chip on the waters. Moods or rational pur- 
pose ? that is the inevitable alternative. 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 113 

III 

Loyalty or Disloyalty 

Or one may put the contrast between the 
two kinds of lives which men have always 
recognized as the contrast between loyalty 
and disloyalty; between fidelity and treach- 
ery to the best one knows. And the distinc- 
tion cuts deep. One may find his friend very 
faulty^ very imperfect, even vacillating, and 
still maintain his friendship ; but the one thing 
that a personal relation cannot stand is ulti- 
mate treachery and disloyalty. Whatever 
one's ideal, whatever his professed friendship, 
if he is at bottom disloyal to it, if in it he has 
proved a traitor, he has thereby passed 
under the judgment of his own eternal con- 
tempt ; he has committed the sin, as Profes- 
sor Royce says, which is essentially unpar- 
donable. For even if God can forgive it, the 
man cannot forgive himself. 

What I point out (Professor Royce writes) is that, if a 
man has won practically a free and conscious view of 
what his honor requires of him, the reverse side of this 
view is also present. This reverse side takes the form 
of knowing what, for this man himself, it would mean 
to be willfully false to his honor. One who knows that 
he freely serves his cause, knows that he could, if he 



114 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

chose, become a traitor. And if indeed he freely 
serves his cause, he knows whether or no he could for- 
give himself if he willfully became a traitor. Whoever, 
through grace, has found the beloved of his life, and now 
freely lives the life of love, knows that he could, if he 
chose, betray his beloved. And he knows what esti- 
mate his own free choice now requires him to put upon 
such betrayal. Choose your cause, your beloved, and 
your moral ideal, as you please. What I now point out 
is that so to choose is to imply your power to define 
what, for you, would be the unpardonable sin if you 
committed it. This unpardonable sin would be 
betrayal. 

There is no evading the contrast between 
fidelity and betrayal. 

IV 

Following One's Conscience or Not 

Men have more commonly characterized 
the two types of life as the life of following 
one's conscience or not following it. It may 
be a very imperfect conscience that one has ; 
his sense of obligation may lack in enlighten- 
ment, in breadth and depth and delicacy of 
perception ; nevertheless, if he is utterly true 
to the best he knows, he is living a life dia- 
metrically opposed to the life of the man who, 
with keener sense of duty, deliberately turns 
his back upon it. The finally testing question 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 115 

in life is not whether you measure up to some 
other's conscience for you, but simply whether 
you measure up to your own conscience, to 
your own vision of duty. One's own unful- 
filled vision ! — this it is that condemns. 



The Surrender or Not, to the Scientific 

Spirit 

Or one might put the difference between 
the essentially earnest and the essentially 
frivolous life by saying it is like the difference 
between the all-round surrender or not, to 
such a demand as the scientific spirit makes — 
the demand for a passion for reality, a passion 
for truth, and for utter fidelity to it. No 
generation has had this decision thrust upon 
it more imperatively than our own. The 
great achievements of modern science are just 
so many individual and detailed demonstra- 
tions that the universe belongs to the men 
who will face the facts, who are determined to 
find the truth, and equally determined to do 
the truth. No other generation ever had so 
little excuse for cherishing prejudice, and for 
turning aside from the path of utter intellec- 
tual integrity. And in the end such a decision 



Ii6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

must carry with it all the achievements of 
man's higher moral and religious life. Man's 
whole nature is so intrinsically a unity that a 
genuine passion for the truth cannot fail to 
affect the entire life. 

VI 

The Larger Life or the Lesser Good 

Or, once again, one may say that the deci- 
sion for which life calls is the decision between 
the determination to seek the larger life, the 
utmost of which we are capable, even under 
the guise of self-denial, or constant content 
with the lesser good. This is perhaps, as I 
have elsewhere pointed out,^ the special form 
of temptation to which our own peculiarly 
complex and distracted age is subject. Our 
times offer the choice of so many lesser and yet 
considerable goods, that we find it peculiarly 
easy to sacrifice the highest to what is, after 
all, only indifi'erently good. It mightily con- 
cerns the earnest man that he should have 
overcome for himself this deadly peril of the 
lower attainment. 

* Set Religion as Life, Chap. I, on " The Peril of the Lesser 
Good." 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 117 

VII 

Wilful or Obedient 

From a little different point of view, men 
have often characterized the two types of life 
by the words "wilful'' and "obedient." The 
words represent, no doubt, in part, the differ- 
ence between two natural temperaments — 
the temperament of self-assertion, and the 
temperament of self-surrender. And so far 
as it is only this contrast that is in mind, we 
have no right to say that the true life lies in 
either the one direction or the other. All 
true living involves both self-assertion and 
self-surrender; both individual independence 
and fellowship with other men. But back of 
the terms "wilfuP' and "obedient," there 
lies a more fundamental ethical distinction — 
the distinction between the selfishly wilful 
life and the life which is willing to subordinate 
its own selfish "want" and will to the larger 
considerations of the general good. An es- 
sentially wilful life is one to which many of us 
find ourselves greatly tempted, but it is not 
the less indubitably a life essentially wrong and 
unworthy. It concerns the man who is am- 
bitious for the best, to make certain that he is 
not leading a simply wilful life; that he is 



ii8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

not mistaking his own selfish obstinacy for 
conscientious scruples. ^' Great and sacred/' 
says Martineau, ''is obedience; he who is 
not able, in the highest majesty of manhood, 
to obey, with clear and open brow, a Law 
higher than himself, is barren of all faith and 
love; and tightens his chains, moreover, in 
struggling to be free." 

VIII 

Following Duty or Pleasure 

Lowell phrases the contrast, in his poem 
''The Parting of the Ways," as the contrast 
between the following of duty or the following 
of pleasure. Doubtless this contrast, too, has 
often been used in a false and unwarranted 
fashion. In a universe that is the creation of 
a righteous God, it cannot be that duty and 
happiness shall always be dissociated. And 
unquestionably there has been much false 
reasoning upon this seeming contrast. But 
Lowell himself illustrates in his poem how 
pleasure followed for its own sake proves 
wholly disillusioning, and how duty followed 
in indifference to pleasure gives the unex- 
pected and great reward of happiness. And 
the old contrast has still its great element of 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 119 

truth. For he who makes pleasure his aim 
will certainly live an unworthy life. And he 
who is in dead earnest, on the other hand, to 
find out what the call of duty, "stern daughter 
of God," is, and to obey it, will live not only 
a life of worthiness, but will find in it the deep- 
est satisfaction that life can give. To make 
duty grim and sour is doubtless a kind of 
implicit blasphemy, for it denies that God's 
will is a loving will. But one must just as 
straightly and squarely recognize that for a 
full-orbed man to devote his life to the pur- 
suit of pleasure is essential failure. For duty 
means the call of a man's own highest ideal. 
When he fails to follow that, he fails indeed. 

IX 

Taking on or Refusing the Will of God 

This implies the contrast, that the religious 
man is in the habit of making, between taking 
on or refusing the will of God as the supreme 
law of one's life. If there be such a God at 
all as Christ reveals, there can be no broader 
or more fundamental way than this, of putting 
the contrast between the lives of men. Men 
of the religious spirit have instinctively felt 
that a true man ought to be able to say, after 



120 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

Christ, "I am come, not to do mine own will 
but the will of him that sent me" ; and that 
it belongs to the very essence of life so to 
choose the will of God, ^^with that stoop of the 
soul which in bending upraiseth it too." Let 
a man, now, make clear to himself what the 
mere presence of such a ruling purpose in his 
life would do. If I truly have just one aim 
in every situation — the aim to know and to 
do the will of God — how certainly will the 
entire atmosphere oi my life be aifected by 
this ruling purpose. As I have elsewhere 
pointed out, such a supreme purpose to know 
and do the will of God, utterly taken on, 
thereby lifts the life above personal caprice 
and prejudice. It inevitably clears one's 
judgment. It makes a sure road to the 
knowledge of all needful vital truth. It brings 
singleness and simplicity — the very secret 
of greatness — into the soul. Such single- 
minded devotedness to the one duty in hand 
gives great power of work as well, and great 
relief from anxious responsibility. And so 
far as one has thrown himself with all his 
soul into line with the eternal plans of God, 
so far he may know that the permanence and 
triumph of the divine purpose are his. For 
"he that doeth the will of God abideth for- 
ever." 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 121 

Speak, History ! who are life's victors ? 

Unroll thy long annals and say — 
Are they those whom the world called the victors, who 

wen the success of a day ? 
The martyrs or Nero? The Spartans who fell at 

Thermopylae's tryst, 
Or the Persians and Xerxes ? His judges or Socrates ? 

Pilate or Christ ? 

Deep-going Ethical Decision, even with- 
out Religious Faith 

Even when one's religious conviction is 
seriously clouded, a deep-going ethical deci- 
sion that confronts the two kinds of lives and 
chooses with all one's power the right, not only 
solves the central issue of life, but may bring 
as well a great new sense of relation to God, 
as in Dr. Bushnell's own case. Dr. Bushnell's 
sermon upon "The Dissolving of Doubts" 
was the outcome of his own experience. In 
the year 183 1 he was a tutor in Yale College. 

The winter was marked by a religious revival. (I 
quote his life.) What, then, in this great revival was 
this man to do ? and what was to become of him } 
Here he was in the glow of his ambition for the future, 
tasting keenly of a new success, his fine passage at arms 
in the editorial chair of a New York daily, ready to be 
admitted to the bar, successful and popular as a College 



122 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

Instructor, but all at sea in doubt, and default reli- 
giously. That baptism of the Holy Ghost and of fire 
compassed him all about. When the work was at its 
height, he and his division of students, who fairly 
worshipped him, stood unmoved apparently, when all 
beside were in a glow. 

It was in the chapel of Yale College, appro- 
priately, that Dr. Bushnell, years after, in the 
sermon mentioned above, drew the sketch 
of his own experience, as that of another. 

A kind of leaden aspect overhangs the world. Till, 
finally, pacing his chamber some day, there comes up 
suddenly the question, "Is there then no truth that I 
do believe .^" "Yes, there is this one, now that I think 
of it; there is a distinction of right and wrong that 
I never doubted, and I see not how I can ; I am even 
quite sure of it." Then forthwith starts up the ques- 
tion, "Have I then ever taken the principle of right for 
my law ? I have done right things as men speak ; have 
I ever thrown my life out on the principle to become all 
it requires of me?" "No, I have not, consciously, I 
have not. Ah ! then, here is something for me to do ! 
No matter what becomes of my questions — nothing 
ought to become of them, if I cannot take a first prin- 
ciple, so inevitably true and live in it." The very sug- 
gestion seems to be a kind of revelation. It is even a 
relief to feel the conviction it brings. "Here then," he 
says, "will I begin. If there is a God, as I rather hope 
there is, and very dimly believe, he is a right God. If 
I have lost him in wrong, perhaps I shall find him in 
right. Will he not help me ^ or perchance, even be 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 123 

discovered to me?" Now the decisive moment is 
come. He drops on his knees, and there he prays to 
the dim God, dimly felt, confessing the dimness for 
honesty's sake, and asking for help that he may begin a 
right life. He bows himself on it, as he prays, choosing 
it to be henceforth his unalterable, eternal endeavor. 
It is an awfully dark prayer in the look of it ; but the 
truest and best he can make, the better and the more 
true, that he puts no orthodox colors on it; and the 
prayer and the vow are so profoundly meant that his 
soul is borne up, into God's help, as it were, by some 
unseen chariot, and permitted to see the opening of 
heaven, even sooner than he opens his eyes. He rises, 
and it Is as if he had gotten wings. The whole sky 
IS luminous about him. It is the morning, as it were, 
of a new eternity. After this, all troublesome doubt of 
God's reality is gone, for he has found him ! A being 
so profoundly felt, must inevitably be. 

The light v^ould not, in all cases, come at 
once, so clearly and fully as here ; but it will 
come ! To bow oneself with all one's soul on 
this basic decision to do the right, this is the 
challenge. All else can wait. 

XI 

The Love of the Father or the Love of 
THE World 

Far back in the history of Christianity, in 
the strong sense of the conflict of the spirit 
of the new faith with the old spirit in the world. 



124 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

there arose another way of putting this con- 
trast between lives — the love of the Father 
and the love of the world. ''Love not the 
world/' wrote the old Christian pastor, 
''neither the things that are in the world. 
If any man love the world, the love of the 
Father is not in him. For all that is in the 
world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of 
the eyes and the vain glory of life, is not of the 
Father, but is of the world. And the world 
passeth away, and the lust thereof ; but he that 
doeth the will of God abideth forever." Jesus 
put the same essential contrast in his words, 
"Ye cannot serve God and mammon.'' "No 
man can serve two masters." It seems an 
old-fashioned phrasing to us now, and yet it 
never concerned any generation more than 
ours. How perennial and how modern the 
antithesis still is, Mrs. Comer's recent story, 
"The Massey Money," illustrated. Old Jabez 
Massey is nearing his end, and giving his last 
instructions to his niece, Jane Dreer, whom he 
means to make his heir. 

"When you come to die, you must pick and choose 
as I am doing. I lay it on you that you find me a lady 
for your heir !" 

"Your notion of a lady, now, — what is it, Jabez?'* 
He tottered to his feet again and lifted his hands 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 125 

to heaven. His face was terrible. I seemed to see 
something hard and avaricious tearing its way up from 
the bottom of his soul, as though it were an evil spirit 
going out of him. 

^^One whom the dollar doesnH dominate^ by GodT^ he 
cried, and fell back in his chair. 



"I lay it on you, Jane," and he bent forward as he 
spoke, dragging his words as if they weighed a ton, his 
sharp old eyes boring into mine like gimlets all the 
while, *'I lay it on you, Jane, that from this hour you 
watch yourself until you see what the Massey money 
does with you. When you come to your end of days, tell 
some one, whom you will, what it has been to you and 
done to you. Tell them the very truth ! It is just 
common money, like that of other men, no better, not 
much worse — but I have seen it work. I watched 
my father and my mother, I watched my brothers and 
my sister. Most of all I watched — myself," said he. 
"No use to tell you what I've seen — no use ! But I 
lay it on you that you watch and see." 

And now Jane Dreer, near the end of her 
own days, is recounting to Mayannah, the 
widow of her son Harold, her own experience 
with the Massey money. 

"These women we know are like you and me, 
Mayannah, cumberers of the ground ! It used to make 
me furious some nights in those Southern hotels, the 
way you could hear 'em spatting on the cold cream all 
down the corridor, from room to room. And yet 



126 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

there's no harm in cold cream. It's only that the 
women are all so fat and idle and pampered, and never 
thinking of a thing except to spend. I came to spending 
too late, I suppose. I can't help thinking with Jabez 
that there must be other things to a lady, though I 
don't claim there's been much else for twenty years to 
me. I can look back and see how I had the money and 
I spent it, but it never made me really rich. I've been 
an idle, discontented, luxury-loving old woman, rest- 
less, and craving I don't know what. If anybody's 
been the better for my being alive since Harold died, 
I don't know who it is. 

"I suppose you want the Massey money as much as I 
did, and plan as I did what fine things you are going to 
do with it." . . . "But I tell you, Mayannah Dreer, 
you aren't Jabez Massey's lady and the money will 
not go to you!" . . . She looked at the silent figure 
across the room for a response, and as she looked 
Mayannah literally flashed to her feet. . . . 

"Mother Dreer," said this Mayannah swiftly, 
"there are a few things I simply have to tell you if I die 
for it. I am tired of turning the other cheek. It's 
true I've lived with you for the last ten years, and you've 
grown more discontented every year. / can tell you 
what the money has done for you, — it has blinded you 
to the very thing you are trying to find ! You will never 
find a lady while you look for her with Jane Dreer's 
eyes ! I know a dozen women like the one you have 
been hunting. So do you, but, don't you see, they 
can't show that side of themselves to you. You don't 
call it out, and you can't see it when it shows itself. It 
has got to be in you before you can know it is in them ! 
— And that is Gospel truth, and it is the worst thing the 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 127 

Massey money has done for you. Why, you wouldn't 
know heaven itself if you saw it with those eyes !" 

And then Jane Dreer, in reaction from her 
first hot and sudden anger, finally sees more 
clearly and dictates her will : 

I give and bequeath all property, both real and 
personal, of which I may die possessed, to Mayannah 
Dreer, once wife, now widow, of my son. 

And this I do in fulfilment of a private compact 
between myself and Jabez Massey, whose heir I was, to 
the effect that his wealth should pass into a "lady's" 
hands. I have searched this land and Europe for such 
an one as he described to me, but my eyes were holden, 
for I found not one among the people who fed me at 
their tables and broke bread at mine. 

At last I saw the woman I was seeking, sitting at my 
hearth. I have despised her parentage, but her heart 
is higher than my heart. She is gentle, simple, and 
tender; she is fearless, patient, warm of heart. She 
knows neither guile nor greed. She was the wife of 
my son, and she worshipped him. To whom should I 
give this wealth if not to her ? It cannot curse her, 
for she is beyond the domination of the dollar. 

The word of judgment ever is : 

Thy choice was earth ; thou didst attest 

'Twas fitter spirit should subserve 

Flesh, than flesh refine to nerve 

Beneath the spirit's play. 

. . . Thou art shut 

Out of the heaven of spirit ; glut 

Thy sense upon the world ; 'Tis thine 

Forever — take it ! 



128 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

XII 

Selfish or Unselfish 

Our age of the social consciousness feels 
even more strongly the contrast between lives 
as selfish or unselfish. It knows something 
at least of the vital difference between the life 
of ingrained selfishness, on the one hand, and 
the life of love and service on the other. The 
great commandment of love was never more 
at home in the thought of any age. It feels 
the appeal of Christ's solemn word, "Inas- 
much as ye did it unto one of these my 
brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me." 
No modern man can quite excuse himself, 
thus, from avowedly choosing between the 
essentially friendly and the essentially un- 
friendly life. And the essentially friendly 
life must be the life of universal good-will 
that draws no lines of race prejudice. 

Prone in the road he lay, 
Wounded and sore bested ; 
Priests, Levites, passed that way, 
And turned aside the head. 
They were not hardened men 
In human service slack : 
His need was great : but then 
His face, you see, was black. 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 129 

XIII 

Disciple of Christ or Not 

This whole point of view is so essentially 
Christ's that it inevitably suggests the pe- 
culiarly Christian statement of the contrast 
between lives — counting oneself a disciple 
of Christ or not. Is there any better or surer 
way of putting the vital test to lives ? Even 
John Stuart Mill could say : "Not even now, 
could it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to 
find a better translation of the rule of virtue 
from the abstract into the concrete, than to 
endeavor so to live that Christ would approve 
of our life." This contrast between the man 
who counts himself first and foremost a dis- 
ciple of Christ, and him who does not, will 
include all that is true in the other contrasts 
already considered. And as Mill's own word 
would suggest, it makes the righteous life real 
and concrete and vital and personal and spirit- 
ual, and at the same time gives to the moral 
life the religious basis of the surest relation 
to God. We know, in fact, no touchstone of 
character so sure as the spirit of Christ's own 
life. As surely as the magnet draws the iron 
filings out of the sand, so surely, it seems to us, 
does the character of Christ, where it is truly 



I30 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

seen, appeal to the truest in character every- 
where. He Is the great master of the art of 
life. The race has no heritage so rich as that 
it has in its priceless inheritance from his life. 
Here, as we have already seen, in his teaching 
and living is the best insight into the laws of 
life. Here is the highest in character. Here 
are the supreme ideals and standards for in- 
dividual and community and nation. Here 
are the world's crowning moral convictions 
and hopes. Here, too, is the supreme dynamic 
for true living. And, just because of all this, 
here, too, are the surest revelation of God, 
and the greatest persuasive of the love of 
God — a life able to call out absolute trust. 
How can a man be dead in earnest to get the 
best insights, the best character, the best 
ideals and standards, the best convictions 
and hopes, the best dynamic and the best 
revelation of God, and not put his life into the 
closest possible relation to the life of this 
master of all life ? Is there conceivable any 
better way of making the great life decision 
for which all our existence calls, any better 
way of seeking the largest life, any surer way 
to God, than by taking on determinedly and 
avowedly the discipleship of Christ ? 

Life's crucial questions, then, are insistent, 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL DECISION 131 

and are such as these : Are you to drift or 
steer ? Is there to be for you that dumb 
turning of the will and tightening of your heart- 
strings as you say — "Yes, I will even have it 
so!'' or is all decision to be lacking? Are 
moods to rule your life or an all-pervading 
rational purpose ? Are you to be fundamen- 
tally loyal to your own best vision, or disloyal 
with the disloyalty you yourselves can never 
forgive ? In a scientific generation have you 
given the passion for the truth full course with 
you, or has it seemed a small matter ? Have 
you defeated for yourselves the perpetual peril 
of the lesser good, or have you yielded to it ? 
In the depths of your inner life are you wilful or 
obedient ? Are you following duty or pleas- 
ure ? Have you taken on the will of God as 
the supreme law of your life, or have you re- 
jected it ? Have you ever bowed yourselves, 
like Dr. Bushnell, with all your souls on the 
basic decision to do the right as God gives 
you to see the right, and let its divine light in on 
your lives ? In this age of stupendous material 
resources, are your lives to be dominated by 
the dollar or emancipated from it ? Have 
you committed yourselves to the unmistak- 
ably friendly life or to the unfriendly life ? 
Do you count yourselves first and foremost 



132 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

determinedly and avowedly disciples of the 
Master of Life, or has his heroic sifting call 
found small response in you ? 

These, in the experience of the race, we may 
well believe, are life's searching testing ques- 
tions. 

And it is essentially one decision which a 
man makes in answer to them all, — life's 
fundamental decision. It gives a new sense 
of the unity of all earnest living, to see how 
alike and how inevitable these decisions are. 
And a man will be helped in making and carry- 
ing through his life's fundamental decision 
by a better understanding of life's fundamental 
paradox, to which we next turn. 



CHAPTER V 

THE QUESTION OF LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL 
PARADOX — THE QUESTION OF LIBERTY 
AND LAW: THE LAW OF LIBERTY 

I 

The Fundamental Nature of the Problem 

We turn to another fundamental question, 
both theoretical and practical, a perennial 
problem, a problem that has occupied men 
since they began to ponder spiritual issues ; 
a problem with which great thinkers in phi- 
losophy and morals and religion have been 
engaged ; a problem that still has to do with 
the very essence of life for every earnest 
man; and a problem peculiarly demanding 
to be rethought, just now — the problem of 
liberty and law. 

Our theme — The Law of Liberty — states 
a paradox ; but it is a paradox that men have 
always to solve. How can I have liberty 
without license? How can I enthrone the 
law of righteousness in my life without legal- 
ism ? How can I accept the redemption of 

133 



134 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

religion, of divine grace, and still keep a 
character genuinely my own ? These are 
questions both profound and intensely prac- 
tical. 

How difficult men have found the solution 
of this problem, the whole spiritual history 
of the race bears witness. It is the problem 
of prophet and priest in Judaism ; the prob- 
lem of faith and works and antinomianism in 
the New Testament ; the problem of justifica- 
tion by faith in the Reformation ; the prob- 
lem of the Ethics of Kant, with its insistence 
on self-legislation ; the problem of Nietzsche 
— to name no other; the problem of "free 
lovers" of all kinds and times; and, in one 
form, the problem of democracy itself — the 
problem of self-government. It is the great 
life problem that Christ believed himself to 
have solved. 

We may well take our start from the New 
Testament ; for all the elements of the prob- 
lem are there illustrated : Judaistic legalism 
and antinomianism ; the beginnings of medie- 
val asceticism and mysticism ; the anxieties 
of those who have seen the doctrines of the 
free grace of God and of salvation by faith 
abused ; the other anxieties of those who see 
Christianity becoming only another legalism ; 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 135 

and, soaring above all, the expression of the 
abounding life of free children of the Heavenly 
Father. 

No fewer than five books of the New Testa- 
ment are directly and primarily occupied 
with this theme : Galatians and Romans, 
whose watchword is "For freedom did Christ 
set us free; stand fast therefore, and be not 
entangled again in a yoke of bondage"; 
James, which sounds the warning, "Faith, if 
it have not works, is dead in itself"; and 
Second Peter and the curious little book of 
Jude, that are warning against a licentious 
antinomianism. 

The authors of James, Second Peter, and 
Jude have seen the great doctrines of justifi- 
cation by faith, of salvation by grace, of the 
free forgiveness of God, and of Christian 
liberty, made an excuse for licentious absence 
of character, and are calling men back to the 
insistent ethical test in religion: "Be ye 
doers of the word, and not hearers only, 
deluding your own selves." 

Paul in Galatians and Romans has seen all 
freedom and joy, not only, but all inner 
righteousness, and all grace and beauty of 
character, so sapped by a hard and haughty 
legalism, that he glories in the deliverance 



136 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

that Christ has brought from legal bondage ; 
and his great words are, inevitably, faith, and 
love, and grace, and forgiveness, and liberty. 
These were ideas too great for his generation 
rightly to grasp, and their abuse produced a 
reaction to a new legalism that tainted Chris- 
tianity for dreary years. But to Paul it was 
inconceivable that faith, and love, and grace, 
and forgiveness, and liberty should mean 
license. The trust and the love called out by 
the matchless gracious personal revelation of 
God in Christ stirred new powers in him, and 
held him to a grateful and quenchless am- 
bition for such a life as Christ's, and brought 
him victory where before he had failed. The 
free grace and forgiveness of a holy God, such 
as Christ's life portrayed, could but mean 
that God was pledged to cooperate with him 
in the attainment of a life worthy of a child 
of God. Like Christ, he himself found his 
highest liberty in devotion to his Father's 
will. No man, he was sure, could really be 
drawn to Christ and not become like him — 
not by painful legal performances, but by 
the healthful contagion of Christ's own spirit. 
Paul had caught, thus, a new vision of 
God's purpose concerning men. He had 
come to see that men were not made to be 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 137 

petty egoists, shut up within the narrow walls 
of their own separate selves, but that they 
were created on so large a plan that they 
could not come to their best independently 
either of one another or of God, — that they 
were made in every fiber of their beings for 
such fellowships. To hold back from these 
fellowships was to insure defeat. It was an 
utterly false and mistaken pride, therefore, 
that in one's struggle for character shut the 
door on other lives, human and divine, which 
were really part and parcel of one's self. 

II 

Why this Problem Constantly Recurs 

Let us stop a moment to make plain how 
absolutely essential both freedom and char- 
acter, both law and liberty, are, and how vital 
to all satisfying life is the inner meaning of 
both contentions. 

What, in the first place, is law at bottom 
— all law that ultimately a man ought to 
obey? It is intended, evidently, to secure a 
society united in the pursuit of certain great 
common goods ; it is a way of life ; — a way 
that the experience of the race indicates that 
it is desirable for the common good of all 



138 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

that all men follow ; a way so good that it is 
felt to be embodied in our natures as the will 
of our Creator for us, and therefore a way of 
life. 

When human law or custom becomes some- 
thing else ; when it serves no common good ; 
when it will not bear the test of racial experi- 
ence ; when we cannot believe it represents a 
true ought or a true interpretation of the 
will of God, it thereby loses all authority as 
law, and the ethical law in the true sense 
abrogates the law falsely so called. Not all 
revolt against existing law, therefore, is law- 
lessness. Many a smug but dire injustice is 
hidden under law. 

The insistent and eternal demand for char- 
acter is the demand for obedience to a law 
that can be conceived to be the will of an all- 
loving God. Now to try to get away from 
that law is to flee from life, for it is an attempt 
to get away from one's own highest ideal. 
That is not to come into larger life, but ulti- 
mately to take all self-respect and dignity and 
worth out of living. The demand for liberty 
too frequently forgets that some sphere of 
order and law is essential to give freedom 
itself any value, and so it turns its revolt 
against a law into a revolt against law itself ; 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 139 

its revolt against a particular form of order 
into a revolt against all order. There is a 
widespread menacing tendency in all spheres 
of our modern life — the tendency to forget 
that self-control is a prime condition of every- 
thing worth while in life. "Letting oneself 
go" is a good road to nothing except insanity. 
There is much talk of so-called "personal 
liberty/' that really means liberty to debauch 
the community, liberty to make conditions 
far harder for both personal and social 
progress. 

But the very fact that conceptions of law 
can so change; that imperfect, developing 
men can at one stage find the preservation of 
a common good in a law that later seems to 
them a hindrance to growth and to larger life, 
itself illustrates and justifies the perennial 
demand for liberty. Conditions change. 
Men develop. New ideals arise. Readjust- 
ment is imperative. What adjustment, is 
always the question. 

All men agree that in seeking to attain a 
common good there must be no unnecessary 
interference with the freedom of the individual. 
Institutions, the state, the law itself, all ulti- 
mately exist for the greater good of individual 
citizens. Too heavy a price in individual 



I40 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

freedom may easily be paid for a well-recog- 
nized common good. 

But the justification of the demand for 
liberty lies much deeper than this. The one 
thing that the individual has to give to the 
common good is himself, his fully realized 
possibilities. But this complete self-realiza- 
tion is also his own individual highest good. 
From both points of view, therefore, there is 
required the freedom for the individual to 
develop his largest possibilities, and this re- 
quires something more than selfish self-will. 
And law — the expressed will of the whole 
community — must often come in, not to 
hinder, but to preserve this freedom of the 
individual, his full initiative — to protect the 
individual against the unwarranted aggres- 
sions of others. The community suffers wher- 
ever any individual citizen has not the liberty 
to make his full contribution to the common 
life. From this angle it is hardly too much 
to say that law itself exists to insure the 
highest and largest liberty to the individual. 

But the demand for liberty has a still deeper 
source. A man is not truly a man unless he 
has an inner life of his own ; freedom of 
thought, freedom of investigation, freedom 
to be himself in his inmost life. Character 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 141 

cannot be laid upon him from without. He 
must see for himself and choose for himself. 
A fundamentally good society, therefore, is 
not a society in which every wrong act is 
forbidden by law and prevented by an omnis- 
cient and omnipotent police force, but a 
society in which men choose for themselves 
obedience to the highest ideals they have seen. 
But this requires liberty at every step, as well 
as the developing power of law. The great 
aim of human life and society is to develop 
free men who choose the right, not to get a 
certain sort of external conduct. God, him- 
self, counts this free choice of the right so 
infinite in value as to be worth the terrible 
price of all the sin and suffering which the 
abuse of men's freedom has brought into the 
world. He has given men no play freedom, 
but a freedom terribly real. And human 
society in all its lawmaking may never forget 
the eternal need of freedom. 

In the solution of this constant paradox of 
liberty and law, men must therefore learn 
patience with men; patience with the 
blunderers of the race; patience with its 
born legislators ; patience with its born rebels ; 
patience with its common men fighting their 
way slowly to character; patience with its 



142 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

genuises and prophets, with their new and 
sudden visions ; for both law and liberty- 
must be kept, both character and freedom. 

The constant recurrence of the problem of 
liberty and law will be understood also when 
we see that this problem is at bottom the 
problem of the radical and the conservative, 
and the problem of "absolute natural right," 
on the one hand, and of "historic legitimate 
right," on the other; the problem of justice 
to the past and of justice to the present and 
future. And all are represented at any time 
in society by the members of three genera- 
tions. But just as a sphere of law is neces- 
sary to give meaning to freedom, and just as 
the preservation of freedom of initiative must 
be the very aim of law ; so the radical and 
conservative at bottom have similar goals. 
The radical does not wish to root up all the 
past, but only the evil and the ineffective for 
good as he conceives it; but he recognizes 
that in thus rooting up the faulty he is cer- 
tain to sacrifice much else. The conservative 
docs not wish to preserve all the past, but 
only all the good of the past ; but he recog- 
nizes that in preserving all of the good he is 
certain to keep, in the structure of society, 
much evil also. Each believes he preserves 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 143 

a balance of good by his method ; and this 
balance of good is the real aim in both cases. 

Like the differences between the advocates 
of law and liberty, the differences between 
the radical and the conservative are to a large 
extent temperamental. They go back finally, 
probably, to the fundamental paradox of the 
inner life — docility and initiative, self-sur- 
render and self-assertion. Character in the 
large sense, as I have elsewhere said, "re- 
quires both self-assertion and self-surrender, 
both individuality and deference, both the 
assertion of a law for oneself and the reason- 
able yielding to others, both loyalty to con- 
viction and open-mindedness, both free inde- 
pendence and obedience." 

And for all social progress, in like manner, 
both temperaments represent indispensable 
human needs. For any solid and enduring 
social progress there must be historical con- 
tinuity, on the one hand, and constant read- 
justment on the other. We do not live in a 
static world ; we are not static beings. We 
are always in process. A blind conservatism 
and a blind radicalism are both therefore im- 
possible. To keep even the good of the past 
in new conditions requires adjustment. To 
get rid of even the most certain evils of the 



144 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

past requires that the new method or custom 
shall be fitted into what men have already- 
attained. Free spontaneity in obedience to 
constantly bettering ideals, — this must be 
the goal of both radical and conservative ; of 
defenders both of liberty and of law. 

Ill 

The New Testament Solution of the 
Problem 

Have we modern men of the twentieth cen- 
tury any better solution ? All five of those 
New Testament books, which are occupied 
with the problem of law and liberty, seek to 
show how one may attain character and avoid 
legalism ; how he may keep freedom of life 
and be true to the highest standards. They 
aim to point the way to definite growth in 
character, as necessarily involved in the very 
idea of the Christian life. Can we penetrate 
their solution ^ 

Our theme suggests the lines on which this 
paradox of the moral and religious life may 
be solved. The passage in James that con- 
tains the theme runs, you will remember, in 
this fashion : ''But be ye doers of the word, 
and not hearers only, deluding your own selves. 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 145 

For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not 
a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his 
natural face in a mirror : for he beholdeth 
himself, and goeth away, and straightway 
forgetteth what manner of man he was. But 
he that looketh into the perfect law, the law 
of liberty, and so continueth, being not a 
hearer that forgetteth but a doer that worketh, 
this man shall be blessed in his doing" 
(James i : 22-25). Here, plainly, there has 
come to the writer an illuminating insight 
into the meaning of any true law of God. It 
is a law of a man's own being, a revealing to 
him of the lines along which life lies. The 
perfect law is a law of liberty, because it is 
the law of one's own being truly discerned 
and stated. In obeying this inner law of his 
own nature one has liberty, the only true 
liberty, and is "blessed'' thereby. Such a law 
simply states the true self which we are to 
realize. We can have freedom only in de- 
veloping toward the goal involved in our in- 
most natures. Here is freedom to follow the 
most fundamental trends of our natures, and 
here, too, is the character that grows out of 
fulfilled ideals. The conception is identical 
with the new conception which modern science 
suggests of the laws of nature, as not hin- 



146 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

drances to life but as ways to conquest and 
larger life. 

James here starts from the side of law, but 
Paul, starting from the side of the inner free- 
dom, reaches essentially the same conclusion. 
"'For in Christ Jesus," he says, "neither cir- 
cumcision availeth anything, nor uncircum- 
cision; but faith working through love.'' 
"For ye, brethren, were called for freedom; 
only use not your freedom for an occasion to 
the flesh, but through love be servants one to 
another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one 
word, even in this : thou shalt love thy neigh- 
bor as thyself." Paul, too, shows that he 
has had a flash of illumination lighting up 
the whole paradox of law and liberty to its 
depths. No external law, he insists, can set 
free the inner man. But the great revelation 
of God in Christ can call out supreme trust 
and love, can appeal at once to the inmost in 
man. Only a great trust can thus profoundly 
call us out, we getting such a vision of the 
fatherly will of God in Christ that we can 
but trust him, and God so trusting us that 
we cannot be unworthy of that trust. Such 
a trust or faith is bound to "work"; it will 
" out " ; it cannot help expressing itself in a 
reflection of the great personality that has 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 147 

aroused it to such trust and love; — "faith 
working through love," inevitably expressing 
its love to God in a sharing in his life of self- 
giving love for men. Such a love has the 
very essence of all true law in itself. It ful- 
fills all law. Such a faith, just because it 
springs from within and works through love, 
will be free and spontaneous, all its outer con- 
duct prompted by an inner spirit. Liberty 
here insures law. 

How surely this must follow on any true 
conception of Christianity; how surely the 
grace of God in Christ carries one on to a life 
like God's own; how surely the freedom of 
religion insures an ethical life, can be very 
briefly put from various angles. 

In the first place, the Christian is a learner 
of Christ, and hence of course makes the ideal 
of Christ's life that of his own. 

Or, the religious man seeks above all, in 
the very passion of his religious desire, to 
share in the life of God himself, and the God 
whom Christ reveals is in his very essence 
self-giving love. One cannot share that life 
and not give himself in loving service to men. 

Naturally, therefore, and again, the New 
Testament came to conceive of a truly ethical 
life as the inevitable fruit of the religious 



148 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

acceptance of Christ. Or, as James puts it, 
the inner spirit is conceived as a fountain 
out of which all external expression comes. 

Or, through a deeper conception of law, as 
we have seen, God's law is felt to be only a 
loving hint of the line of life for us ; the 
ethical command itself, therefore, becoming 
a revelation of the love of God, so that we 
see that in obeying the ethical command we 
are simply following the laws of life into a 
steadily enlarging life. 

IV 

The Relation of the Christian Solution 
OF the Paradox to Other Theories 
OF Life 

This conception is so true to Christ's own 
thought of the will of God as a Father's will, 
as well as to that of James and Paul, and to 
that of the scientific conception of law, that 
we shall do well to try to think it through a 
little further, and see its relation to other 
theories of life. 

A large part of the appeal of selfish pleas- 
ure, for example, lies in its seeming promise 
of larger liberty, of further life. '^I want to 
do as I like;" ''I want to see life," the pleas- 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 149 

ure-seeker urges. "Live while you live/' he 
exhorts. And even the lowest selfish sense 
pleasures do afford some emotional experiences, 
that give temporarily a new sense of freedom 
and elation and interest, and so some seem- 
ing immediate extension of life. Now men 
have a right to expect from life freedom and 
interest and enlargement. And this natural 
cry of the pleasure-seeker shows that con- 
tenders for the ideal may not lightly surrender 
Christ's idea of religion as giving abundant 
life, but must steadily insist on a conception 
of goodness that can be permanently interest- 
ing. One cannot hope to succeed in con- 
stantly whipping his soul back from all that 
he counts of interest and of real value. Men 
need at this point constant enlightenment. 
No virtue is safe that is not both intelligent 
and militant. 

And the clear-sighted man has now come 
to see that to think of moral laws as hin- 
drances to liberty and life is a great mistake. 
He now conceives them rather as formulating 
the outcome of the experience of the race. 
They state, that is, the ways in which we can 
best satisfy the whole man, the ways in 
which we get the most out of these natures 
of ours, the ways in which our beings were 



I50 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

meant to act. To refuse to obey such laws 
written in our constitutions is as absurd as it 
would be to refuse to obey the directions of 
the manufacturer for the running of a superb 
automobile. The directions are not to hamper 
us, but to enable us to get the utmost out of 
our machine. Only a fool would ignore them 
and pride himself meanwhile on his liberty. 
In fact, one gets no real liberty in the use of a 
machine until its laws have become like inner 
laws for him, and it is second nature and auto- 
matic for him to obey them. It is exactly so 
concerning the laws of our bodies and minds. 
If we ignore the fact that we are made for 
action, for heroic achievement, for fine per- 
sonal relations, we shall thereby gain neither 
freedom nor larger life, but make, rather, the 
largest life impossible to us. When men so 
act, they are turning back to lower and cor- 
rupt ends, to ends abandoned in the upreach- 
ing of the race. 

Indeed, religion itself is probably rightly 
conceived as growing out of men's constantly 
extending claim on life, men's persistent re- 
fusal to be satisfied with the finite. ^^ Noth- 
ing," says Johanna Ambrosius, ^'is so insa- 
tiable as the human heart. If it has enough 
to eat and drink, it longs for costly vessels for 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 151 

the food to be served in, and once It possesses 
these It would ask for the blue heavens as a 
tablecloth." Men have unquenchable thirsts 
for extending experience, for permanent out- 
looks and hopes, for constantly enlarging 
life, In a word, for love ; — thirsts that God 
alone can satisfy. The highest law and the 
largest liberty here again come together. 
The constant seeming antinomy between 
pleasure and duty, between the religious and 
the Irreligious life, and the frequent feeling 
that duty and religion limit rather than en- 
large life, are, consequently, usually due to 
false conceptions both of happiness and of 
religion. 

On the one hand, the pleasure-seeker Is 
usually thinking of an Immediate and partial 
and selfish satisfaction; forgetting the ^Hong 
run," forgetting the whole personality, and 
forgetting all others. And the fleeting, un- 
satisfying nature of much that Is called pleas- 
ure, and sought as such. Is so explained. 
"Man shall not live by bread alone." In 
the first place, he Is a creature of memory 
and anticipation ; he cannot live simply in 
the Immediate pleasure of the passing moment. 
In the second place, he Is a creature not of 
appetites only, but of Imagination, and reason 



152 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

and conscience; he has his whole nature 
always to reckon with. In the third place, 
his life is knit up indissolubly with other lives ; 
they are part and parcel of himself. He is so 
made. He cannot, therefore, think simply of 
himself and have largeness of life. In all 
these ways a false conception of happiness 
misleads. The deceptive nature of alcohol, 
as shown under the cold analysis of scientific 
experiment, precisely illustrates the misleading 
nature of the appeal of the immediate and 
partial and selfish pleasure. 

On the other hand, the claim of the moral 
and religious life may also be misconceived. 
Sometimes, with a false asceticism, it is made 
to deny the body's legitimate place. Some- 
times its goodness is conceived only nega- 
tively and legalistically, and so robbed of 
interest and spontaneity, as a mere emptying 
of life, or a hard, disagreeable, and useless 
task arbitrarily imposed. But such a con- 
ception has nothing to do with Christ's 
thought of a steadily advancing, intelligent, 
and unselfish entrance into the loving will of 
God for all men. That carries with it all 
great causes, all high ideals, all inspiring 
devotions and enthusiasms, and alone holds 
the promise of a permanently satisfying life. 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 153 

V 

Modern Examples of the Paradox 

How urgently our own time is demanding 
that we rethink this whole problem of liberty 
and law, violently opposed tendencies show. 

On the one hand there is the host of re- 
formers who are seeking to write into law 
all kinds of imaginable human gains, for- 
getting too often the imperative necessity, if 
civilization is really to advance, that men be 
brought to an inner choice of all real goods. 
For it is well to remember, as President Had- 
ley puts it, that ^^it is easier to pass a radical 
measure that is going to be evaded than to 
secure obedience to a conservative one." 
All of us need to take deeply to heart that 
advanced legislation is in itself no proof of 
progress, if there do not accompany it willing- 
ness to obey the law that expresses the higher 
ideal. We are not to forget that democracy 
is no mere matter of form of government or 
kinds of legislation ; but that democracy goes 
forward in just the proportion in which self- 
discipline accompanies it, as Dr. Jacks so 
incisively reminds us : 

The central problem of democracy is the problem 
of educating the citizen. This, indeed, is a common- 



154 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

place ; but there is reason to think that the kind of 
education required by the citizen, whether as subject 
or legislator, to qualify him for the new part he has to 
play, has not been sufficiently considered. What he 
needs is not merely instruction In political science. 
He does need that; but he needs something else far 
more ; something without which all the political science 
in the world will carry him but a little way. He must 
learn to obey : and the lesson will be all the more diffi- 
cult for him to learn because hitherto democracy has 
been too closely associated with the spirit which prompts 
him to seek escape from authority. Of all modern 
democratic governments, with scarcely one exception, 
it may be said that they were conceived in disobedience 
and born in rebellion. Their watchword has ever been 
"liberty"; but "liberty" interpreted in a sense which 
has obscured its sterner implications. But now that 
democracy has taken up the task of social reform those 
sterner implications are coming into view. None but 
a thoroughly disciplined community can effectually 
deal, through its Government, with social reform. 
The idea, too prevalent in certain quarters, that the 
restraints of social reform will fall exclusively on the 
rich, the idle, the privileged, is a fond illusion. Every 
man of us will be put under restraints such as we have 
never dreamed of; such as few men have ever asked 
themselves whether they were willing, or even able, to 
bear. It is well that we should all realize this truth — 
for it is irrefutable — as we listen to the daring 
programmes and the glowing promises of political 
orators. 

We must learn to obey. We must gird our- 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 155 

selves for that increasing self-discipline that 
is demanded by advancing social aims. 

As opposed to these who are seeking to 
write all reform into law, and are satisfied 
therewith, stand the violent emancipators of 
various classes, like the syndicalists and the 
militant suffragettes, who imagine that force 
of itself can bring emancipation to their re- 
spective classes. Let it be perfectly clear 
here that there is much of injustice to protest 
against. It cannot be justly claimed that 
women have a fair representation in organized 
society to-day. It cannot be justly claimed 
that industrial workers in general are fairly 
sharing in the joint product of labor and capi- 
tal. The shameless record of the mining cor- 
porations of Colorado, in the debauching of 
all the forces of law and justice, is but one 
piece of evidence. How certainly the selfish 
lawlessness of the capitalistic class fruits 
either in the selfish lawlessness of other classes, 
or in the determination to bring all business 
under state control, was witnessed some time 
ago by the conservative Railway Age-Gazette^ 
commenting on current phenomena before the 
reorganization of the New Haven road : " The 
real leaders of Socialism in this country are 
such men as Charles S. Mellen, B. F. Yoakum, 



156 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

and the directors of the New Haven, Frisco, 
and other roads who are too crooked, cowardly, 
indolent, or incapable to perform the duties of 
their positions." 

Nevertheless, selfish force cannot bring the 
emancipation of any class. Not even if they 
could be certainly successful in the use of 
force, could the emancipation so come. We 
are learning that the unspeakable folly of war 
is that it settles nothing; that after all the 
fighting is over, the real solution must be 
reached in other more rational ways. Let 
the Balkan wars bear witness : intolerable 
slaughter and suicide of nations, and abso- 
lutely nothing of value accomplished ! The 
greater European War seems likely to give a 
like demonstration. Any cause is safe in just 
the degree in which it has really won the con- 
viction of men. The real victory of a cause, 
therefore, absolutely requires education, per- 
suasion, and the free choosing of the new 
goal. The forced victory, even if possible, 
thus, is a cheap and insecure victory; the 
more fundamental and difficult task still re- 
mains. A selfish, lawless class victory, that 
willingly ignores all other human interests, 
just because it is selfish and lawless, cannot 
abide. "Nothing is settled until it is settled 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 157 

right/' is still good doctrine, and more clear 
now than ever. These causes of the syndi- 
calist and of the militant suffragette com- 
plain, not without justification, as we have 
seen, that society is not doing them justice. 
But will treacherous use of force remedy that ? 
Can men counsel and practice treachery and 
violence and spread this disease through 
society, and reap the fruit of loyalty and fair 
dealing, and not rather make society itself 
impossible ? Syndicalism is seeking to remedy 
the selfish lawlessness of the capitalistic class 
by a like selfish lawlessness on the part of the 
working class. It is the old fallacy of lynch 
law. Outrage of humanity cannot be cured 
by further outrage. Militant suffragism is 
seeking to win long delayed justice in giving 
women a fair share in government, by a selfish 
lawlessness that would set all government at 
naught. It has not observed even the decen- 
cies of civilized warfare. It is using mob 
violence and it is increasingly provoking mob 
violence. Democracy, we may not forget, 
means not only jr^//-government but self- 
government. Those who are to share in that 
may not appeal to the mob. Nothing is so 
terrible in human society as fundamental 
lawlessness, and it was, therefore, that Kant, 



158 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

who was no believer in character laid on from 
without, still felt compelled to say: "If law 
ceases, all worth of human life on earth 
ceases too." Set your face like a flint against 
selfish lawlessness for any cause. 

And it is in this same direction that we are 
to look for the fallacy of "free lovers" of all 
sorts, who find in the strength of uncontrolled 
passion its own excuse for being. Their doc- 
trine is having, just now, a strange recru- 
descence, and they would fain persuade men 
that the race has, so far, learned nothing con- 
cerning the relations of the sexes. That there 
are many difficult questions here; that our 
conventions have not all been justified ; that 
there have been some strong moral grounds 
for the extension of divorce ; that much that 
has been written of a revolutionary character 
has been written in moral earnestness ; that 
some relations classed legitimate are really 
less justified, in the sight of God, than some 
counted illegitimate — all this need not be 
questioned. 

But, on the one hand, where a real ideal 
has been seriously set up, as by Mrs. Key, 
for example, it is an ideal much more tenuous 
and more difficult of realization both by the 
individual and by society, and hence less 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 159 

practicable, and it is fraught with many 
dubious consequences that make the ideal 
itself exceedingly doubtful. It is very diffi- 
cult to believe that such theories do justice 
either to the sober lessons of evolution, or to 
the experience of the race in marriage. When 
one prominent Feminist can say, — "Per- 
sonally I am inclined to believe that the ulti- 
mate aim of Feminism with regard to mar- 
riage is the practical suppression of marriage 
and the institution of free alliance,'' — one 
cannot help feeling that there is here disclosed 
a bland indifference both to experience and 
to one whole side of the paradox of liberty and 
law. The race will wisely go slow in giving 
to wild speculation so great weight in the 
most important moral questions. Marriage 
will fail, just as any other institution will fail, 
when men bring to it only selfish passion. 
That is a failure, in truth, however, not of an 
institution, but of men. 

But for the most part, these free lovers are 
not truly concerned with great moral ideals 
at all. They are thinking of selfish pleasure, 
and chafe under any permanent obligations. 
They simply are not willing to pay their part 
of the price of a decent civilization. And 
they are pointing to the old, easy, often- 



i6o FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

traveled road of selfish indulgence, allowing 
to impulse supreme control, whatever this 
may cost some one else. It would be pathetic, 
if It were not so shameful and so self-contra- 
dictory, to see how these landers of passion 
persuade themselves with each new relation 
that here is a real affinity, here one may find 
ideals realized, here vow eternal fealty, such 
as they have just belied in utter treachery in 
another relation. The very fact that they 
cannot get away from such idealizing shows 
how surely any love that is to be at all satis- 
fying even to a selfish soul, must be thought 
of as having abiding loyalty. And so long 
as cause and effect exist in the moral world, 
treachery, we may be sure, cannot yield the 
fruits of loyalty; and fine human relations 
cannot be built up out of a series of infideli- 
ties. Hateful, mean, selfish treachery — that 
is what these free lovers are trying to gild. 
The truth is, that such lives surrender the 
helm of will to feeling, and give up in these 
relations moral values altogether. And this 
is finally to prove traitors to the race's task 
of an even tolerable civilization. 

The careless indiff'erence, too, with which 
entire classes of society, in their devotion to 
the pleasure of ''week ends," are willing to 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX i6i 

jeopardize the whole great institution of the 
Sabbath, is simply another illustration of 
selfish lawlessness. One needs to be no ascetic 
to see that the conversion of our Sundays into 
simple pleasure seeking, however innocent in 
itself, is an immense loss to all the deeper 
forces that go to the making of any ciliviza- 
tion deserving the name. Educated men and 
women, at least, may be asked to do thinking 
enough not heedlessly to barter one of the 
great spiritual achievements of the race for a 
couple of days of house parties and auto 
riding and golf. Are we going to lose all 
sense of proportionate values ? 

The weekly harvest of death through auto 
speeding, the like perpetual sacrifice of life 
and limb and childhood through preventable 
accidents and bad industrial conditions, the 
reputation of American tourists in Europe as 
souvenir thieves, the shameless way in which 
supposed respectable people display their 
thefts from hotels and other sources, the fre- 
quent heedless disregard of others' rights to 
property and to quiet by so highly privileged a 
class as college students — these are all alike 
symptoms of the old and new disease of selfish 
lawlessness. 

As civilization goes forward it becomes, like 



1 62 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

the evolution of animal life, more and more 
complex and delicate in its adjustments. The 
forces employed, too, are increasingly powerful. 
The ability of the selfish lawlessness of a few 
to work widespread discomfort and disaster 
is thereby steadily increased, and the demand 
for individual self-control in the same meas- 
ure enlarged. How a whole nation can be 
terrorized by the selfish lawlessness of a few 
was demonstrated in Great Britain by the 
militant suflFragettes, and is being demon- 
strated anew by the growing frightfulness of 
the European War. One selfish boy and a 
paint pot can give discomfort to a community 
for months and even years. A few students 
regardless of the property rights of surround- 
ing communities may seriously diminish the 
privileges of an entire student body and 
blacken their reputation. 

Selfish self-will in any realm, let us be sure, 
is no true liberty; rather is it a sure road to 
cutting short our largest liberties. We must 
rather be able to say with Goethe : " I learned 
that the unspeakable value of true freedom 
consisted not in doing what we please, or all 
that circumstances allow, but in the power of 
doing at once and without restraint whatever 
we consider right." 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 163 

VI 

The Achievement of True Freedom 

This true freedom the New Testament not 
only clearly conceives, but it points the one 
eternal way to reach it. 

Religion itself remains, — what Professor 
James called it, — the one great unlocker of 
men's powers, — the one great emancipator 
of the human soul. Our absolute human 
dependence still bears witness, how inevitably 
we are made for God, how certainly we need 
to become "partakers of the divine nature," 
if we are to fulfill the purpose of our creation. 
As surely as man is made capable of religion, 
so surely is the largest life not possible to him 
until he opens his being to the tides of the 
divine life, to the in-working of the Spirit of 
God. The New Testament emphasis, there- 
fore, upon the doctrine of the Spirit, is an 
inevitable emphasis. And the so-called "new 
thought" of our time is only a less rational 
putting of the sense of our absolute depend- 
ence on the Spirit of God. That the New 
Testament should insist that we are to be 
born of the Spirit, that we are to walk in the 
Spirit, that we are to have in us the witness of 



i64 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

the Spirit, means, not that there is the magical 
appHcation to us of some thing or patent 
process, but the bringing in of a great new 
personal relation that becomes the source of 
all else in life, — a new force, a new capacity, 
a new hope. And this new force of life coun- 
terworks the forces of death. In the moral 
as in the physical life, the only real protection 
against disease and decay is abounding life. 
And in the light of the doctrine of the Spirit, 
God's free forgiveness is seen to mean, not the 
magical setting aside of the consequences of 
our evil choosing, but the counterworking of 
those consequences by a new tide of life with 
its own consequences of further life. 

It is only to put the same great method of 
life in slightly diiferent form, when it is in- 
sisted, with Paul and with Drummond, that 
men's greatest need is persistent association 
with Christ. And it is no outworn way of 
life, which is so suggested even to the man 
of the twentieth century. For that simply 
means that acquaintance with God, as with 
any other person, must be obtained through 
his greatest and most significant self-manifes- 
tation. It is because men have felt that they 
found just this in Christ that he has come to 
have for them such supreme significance. 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 165 

That this is a real experience and not a vision 
(says Professor Drummond), that this life is possible 
to men, is being lived by men to-day, is simple bio- 
graphical fact. From a thousand witnesses I cannot 
forbear to summon one. The following are the words 
of one of the highest intellects this age has known, a 
man who shared the burdens of his country as few have 
done, and who, not in the shadows of old age, but in 
the high noon of his success, gave this confession to the 
world: "I want to speak to-night only a little, but 
that little I desire to speak of the sacred name of 
Christ, who is my life, my inspiration, my hope, and 
my surety. I cannot help stopping and looking back 
upon the past. And I wish, as if I had never done it 
before, to bear witness, not only that it is by the grace 
of God, but that it is by the grace of God as mani- 
fested in Christ Jesus, that I am what I am. I recog- 
nize the sublimity and grandeur of the revelation of 
God in His eternal fatherhood as one that made the 
heavens, that founded the earth, and that regards all 
the tribes of the earth, comprehending them in one 
universal mercy ; but it is the God that is manifested 
in Jesus Christ, revealed by His life, made known by 
the inflections of His feelings, by His discourse, and 
by His deeds — it is that God that I desire to confess 
to-night, and of whom I desire to say, ' By the love of 
God in Christ Jesus I am what I am.' ... In look- 
ing back upon my experience, that part of my life 
which stands out, and which I remember most vividly, 
is just that part that has had some conscious associa- 
tion with Christ. All the rest is pale, and thin, and 
lies like clouds on the horizon. Doctrines, systems, 
measures, methods — what may be called the necessary 



i66 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

mechanical and external part of worship; the part 
which the senses would recognize — this seems to have 
withered and fallen off like leaves of last summer; 
but that part which has taken hold of Christ 
abides." 

^'Can anyone hear this life-music," Profes- 
sor Drummond adds, ''with its throbbing re- 
frain of Christ, and remain unmoved by envy 
or desire ? Yet, till wt have lived like this 
we have never lived at all." 

In such a vital personal relation to God, 
through his great self-revelation in Christ, 
the free grace of religion becomes the natural 
root of law-abiding character. For only so 
does the personal fully replace the legal ; only 
so does solid hope come in ; only so, satisfying 
freedom and a permanently enlarging life. 
For as soon as the moral command is seen to 
be the loving father's will for his children, 
so soon it is seen to be in itself not only a 
promise of life, but a way of life, and law and 
liberty are forever reconciled. 

The circumstances of our time are such as 
almost to compel thoughtful men to try to 
think through again this fundamental para- 
dox of liberty and law. For we are living in 
a world of unusually disturbed standards and 
values ; though it really holds no problem 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 167 

essentially new. We are all being vehemently 
urged to take various one-sided positions, as 
though a totally new light had just dawned 
on the world. 

But in this fundamental paradox we can- 
not be true to the ideals of any adequate 
education, and be one-sided. For we have 
learned, we may hope, the psychological 
necessity of both self-assertion and self- 
surrender. We have learned the scientific 
lesson of victory and liberty through insight 
into law and obedience to it. We have 
learned the historic lesson of the constant 
necessity of both historic continuity and re- 
adjustment. We have learned the esthetic 
lesson that even Art, that seems the freest 
expression of the human spirit, has its inevi- 
table element of self-restraint. 

Therefore, for our individual lives, we are 
not, on the one hand, to lose law out of our 
life. We do not want to make our lives a 
chaos, but a cosmos. On the other hand, we 
are not to lose freedom out of our life, the 
freedom of children of God, the freedom of 
self-realization, the freedom of utter truth to 
our own individuality and to our own highest 
vision. We are to be both true and free. 
And we shall be both true and free if, in the 



1 68 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

spirit of Jesus, we do always and only what a 
genuine, all-inclusive love requires. 

In the task of social reconstruction, too, 
that is pressing upon our generation, we can- 
not evade the double demand of the law of 
liberty. 

On the one hand, social life cannot advance, 
nor even exist, in a lawless world. Our task 
on this side will be three-fold : to help to 
make it steadily more true, first, that the 
laws of our community and state and nation 
are just and righteous laws, which do not 
count things more sacred than persons, which 
allow for the necessary constant adjustments 
to changing conditions, and which so deserve 
the support of all good men ; second, that by 
the patient and persistent processes of educa- 
tion and moral enlightenment, the principles 
embodied in the laws are enthroned in the 
reason and conscience of the community ; and 
third, that so there may not fail that steady 
self-discipline and free self-control and obedi- 
ence which can alone make laws of any final 
avail. 

On the other hand, social life is not worth 
living without freedom. At the foundation of 
all rational society, therefore, there must be 
basic reverence for the individual personality 



LIFE'S FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX 169 

— respect for his liberty and for the sanctity 
of his inner person. But the enormities of 
unrestrained selfishness have been so many; 
and the frightful effects of vast inequalities 
in material conditions so plain, that it now 
seems certain that society has before it a 
series of attempts inordinately to regulate the 
individual, which are certain to provoke in 
turn a reaction to an equally exaggerated 
liberty. But neither extreme should shut 
our eyes to the fact that we cannot make a 
life worth living without freedom ; and that, 
as Hobhouse puts it, ^^the true opposition is 
between the control that cramps the personal 
life and the spiritual order, and the control 
that is aimed at securing the external and 
material conditions of their free and unim- 
peded development''; and with clear dis- 
crimination we must fight the first kind of 
control, and stand for the second. Only so 
can the largest liberty come. 

In these deeper questions of the personal 
and social life rules cannot be given. Prin- 
ciples alone avail. Just how, in the perplex- 
ing individual situations which we are all to 
confront, these principles are to be applied 
no man can tell. And it is well that it is so. 
For our own growth and enlargement are 



I70 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

themselves to be found in the solving and re- 
solving of this perpetual paradox of human 
life — the paradox of liberty and law. 

A further fundamental question of great- 
practical import confronts the Christian ideal- 
ist, — the increasingly pressing question of 
Christian unity. For the conflicts within 
Christian ranks cannot but cast doubt upon 
the adequacy of the Christian ideal. How is 
that Christian unity to be conceived and 
sought ? 



CHAPTER VI 

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY — 
THE CONFESSION OF CHRIST 

In our efforts for the union of all Christians, 
is there already a unity that we are trying 
more adequately to express, or are we seeking 
to create, out of hand, a unity that is now 
quite non-existent ? If we did not believe 
there was already a real and vital unity of 
spirit, should we be seeking a closer union ? 
What, then, is the unity of spirit which alone 
keeps all our efforts for closer union from 
being utterly vain and futile ? 

I 
The One Uniting Word is Christian 

Doubtless it is true, as a recent theological 
treatise says, that union cannot come ^'by 
alleging ^ unity of spirit' as an excuse for 
acquiescence in actual disunion"; but it is 
even more to be feared that such under- 
estimation of the significance of unity of 

171 



172 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

spirit as seems here implied, will make actual 
union impossible. It is simply and solely 
that unity of spirit, which makes it worth 
while to talk about union at all. What, 
then, is that unity of spirit? We are plainly 
seeking, are we not, the more manifest union 
of Christendom ; that all the Christian forces 
of every name may present a united front to 
the world. We are seeking the union of all 
believers in Christianity, of all Christian 
people, of all who think Christianity the 
highest and final religion, of all who believe 
Christ to be the supreme revealer of God, of 
all those who find the great source of their 
spiritual life in God's revelation of himself in 
Christ, of all who count themselves, first and 
foremost, learners of Christ. The one uniting 
word is Christian. We are seeking the union 
of all confessors of Christ. This is our real 
unity : that we all, with loyal devotion, con- 
fess Christ. This is what touches our hearts 
and makes us long for mutual understanding 
and for union. This other's loyalty to Christ 
is like my own ; — that is the great moving 
consideration. And this is a far deeper and 
more significant thing, we may not forget, 
than any union of effort or plan or creed or 
organization that might grow out of that 



THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 173 

unity of spirit, highly desirable as that closer 
union is. But we shall not make headway 
toward a valuable union by putting the second- 
ary and derivative in place of the primary and 
original — by making external union more 
than unity of spirit. 

Let us glory, then, in the unity that is 
already ours, nor fail to appreciate its sig- 
nificance. For nothing conceivable can give 
such actual and genuine unity as common 
loyalty to a person. The greater that person- 
ality, the more significant the resulting unity. 
Where that person is the supreme personality 
of history, and believed by his confessors to 
be the supreme revelation of God himself — 
the personality that has redeemed their life 
— the unity of spirit is the greatest attainable. 
No uniformity of creed, of ritual, of institu- 
tion, of concerted plan, of government, could 
possibly bring so meaningful a unity. 

Doubtless the very oneness of human nature, 
body and mind, insures that the spirit requires 
embodiment ; that every idea must have some 
mechanical presentment, some answering 
means, some organization, some institution. 
But the body is not thereby made of equal 
importance with the spirit. The significance 
lies nevertheless in the spirit back of all. We 



174 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

need to recall both sides of Lotze's funda- 
mental philosophical thesis and see "how abso- 
lutely universal is the extent and at the same 
time how completely subordinate the sig- 
nificance of the mission which mechanism 
has to fulfil in the structure of the world." 
Doubtless Christianity must have some exter- 
nal embodiment of creed, of ritual, of worship, 
of organization ; but no single particular em- 
bodiment is essential, and all are completely 
subordinate in significance. 

II 

Temperamental Differences 

In every form of expression of our unity of 
spirit in loyal devotion to Christ, individual 
temperamental differences will manifest them- 
selves, and ought to manifest themselves. To 
insist on uniformity in any of these expressions 
is to make real union impossible. As unity 
is more and other than union, so is union 
more and other than uniformity. Even the 
^'Lambeth Quadrilateral," supposing that all 
could agree in all four of its points, is still an 
altogether unsatisfactory basis of union, for 
one reason, just because it looks to too great 
uniformity, and tends to conceive the union 



THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 175 

as thereby accomplished. As surely as it is 
not compromise but comprehension which is 
needed, and as surely as we are all more likely 
to be right in the affirmations that mean most 
to us, rather than in our negations of things 
that do not appeal to us ; so surely the road 
to any union worth while must not be a pre- 
scription of some upon others of favorite ex- 
pressions of any kind. If others find a cer- 
tain means really helpful in the expression of 
their devotion to Christ that we do not find 
helpful, they must have liberty to use that 
means, or lack of means, but not to prescribe 
it upon any others. Liberty to use but not 
to prescribe is essential. However certain it 
is that differences in psychological tempera- 
ment must be taken into account in religion, 
and that these differences are often wide — 
like the so-called "Catholic" and "Protes- 
tant" temperaments — we still must see with 
absolute clearness that the truly essential 
thing is not this or the other of the different 
ways of approach to God in Christ, but the 
desire and purpose so to approach God, and 
the evidence in life that the soul has found 
God and been accepted of him. We have to 
get back of all these differences of tempera- 
mental expression to that unity of spirit that 



176 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

makes it possible to call both types of people 
Christian ; that makes them able to recognize 
in each other unmistakable loyalty to Christ. 

Ill 

A True Organic Unity 

The truth is that we have been very slow in 
coming to recognize in religion — what has 
been long recognized in philosophy and social 
theory — what a true unity is ; that unity 
should be indeed organic, though in a different 
sense from that often meant; and that true 
organic unity presupposes differences, not 
uniformity. Uniformity gives only a sand- 
heap of identical atoms, but no true unity. 
Paul's epoch-making figure of the body of 
Christ with many different members and 
many different offices must not be allowed to 
slip from our minds. We cannot get this 
higher unity of an organic body without dif- 
ferent members and different functions. 
These very differences are necessary if the 
parts of the body are to be members one of 
another, and are to be bound together into 
the more significant unity of the whole organic 
body. Paul's figure of the organism, thus, 
that became so influential later in philosophic. 



THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 177 

ethical, and social thinking, thinks of a true 
unity, but nowhere of uniformity. 

IV 

Uniformity Not Desirable 

Can we make it plain to ourselves that uni- 
formity is in no sense the true aim of our 
efforts for a union of all Christians ? No 
doubt, back of all the essential unity of spirit 
there must be certain implications of creed, 
of worship, of government, of organization. 
But our age ought certainly to be able to come 
to this problem of Christian union in all these 
respects, with a different vision than that of 
preceding centuries. 

Even with reference to the underlying 
creedal statements, it should be remembered, 
we are, in the first place, not seeking for all 
Christians the kind of compromise statement 
that would be involved, for example, in a 
modern Westminster Confession. Readers of 
history may not shut their eyes to the fact 
that there were considerable divergences of 
view in the gathering out of which came that 
creedal statement; and that the statement 
finally reached did not mean that all these 
divergences had disappeared (though some- 



178 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

thing of that may well have happened), so 
much as that Ingenious men had found, upon 
the disputed points, language sufficiently 
vague and ambiguous to allow all parties to 
read their own views into it. Now, such a 
compromise creed is not destitute of value ; — 
it means some real gain in agreement and it 
may give a new sense of unity to those accept- 
ing it. But its value is often mistakenly con- 
ceived, and may turn into a positive damage, 
if the creed be used as a universal prescription, 
or if it be thought to mean real uniformity of 
detailed belief. Most creeds have wrought 
untold damage In this direction. 

It should be equally clear to the modem 
man. In seeking some basal statement of 
belief, that It Is no mere average of Ideas 
which is sought. Such an average Is like the 
abstract average of the statistician which cor- 
responds to no real concrete fact. It Is like 
the statue of an abstract virtue : It lacks the 
convincing reality of the concrete living 
thing. One may reach In that way a creed, 
that Is not the living creed for any one of all 
who subscribe to It — a creed that is not for 
any of them a natural expression of their own 
vital faith. 

Still less should the basic confession of faith 



THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 179 

be the barest minimum of belief in which all 
might conceivably agree. The religious ex- 
perience of the Christian ought rather to 
express itself with increasing richness, and 
reach out in many directions. The psycho- 
logical law is, that that which is not expressed 
dies. And religious experience needs clear 
and thoughtful expression in significant state- 
ments as well as in life. It is no underesti- 
mate of the value of creedal statements that 
is here involved ; rather, it is so alone that 
its true place is given to the creedal statement. 
We ought to see that just because of different 
temperaments, different environments, and 
different modes of education there will be 
different reflections of the Christ that we 
confess, different expressions of what the life 
he has called out in us means. And the 
organic unity which is to be positively sought 
is that which recognizes and preserves these 
differences ; that contends for the value of 
every such honest reflection of the life of 
Jesus, rather than seeks a deadening identity 
of expression. The New Testament itself con- 
sists of a series of such reflections of Christ. 

It is true that Christianity looks to life, 
and that Christian doctrine must bear on life, 
and that the differences between one Chris- 



i8o FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

tian statement of belief and another are likely 
to lie more in the realm of the philosophies 
than in the realm of life. It is true that we 
may well put our emphasis on the strictly 
religious and practical purpose of the Bible 
as intending to reveal to us God and to give 
inspiration to some real sharing in his life. 
And it is true that the one thing in which we 
may all agree is that Christ is the ultimate 
appeal. We can all agree in the confession 
that we wish to make our thinking in this 
sense truly Christian. Any way of life, too, 
has inevitably some corresponding convictions 
that call for thoughtful expression. Yet we 
cannot do justice to a true conception of the 
organic unity of Christians without seeing 
clearly that complete uniformity of belief and 
statement is both impossible and undesirable.-^ 

V 

Complete Uniformity of Belief and 
Statement Impossible 

Complete uniformity of belief and state- 
ment is impossible, in the first place, because 

^ The discussion of this point, it should be said, is rather closely 
parallel to that in my Theology and the Social Consciousness, pp. 167- 
177, though the present treatment is somewhat fuller. But the 
argument here requires recurrence to these considerations. 



THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY i8i 

it is difficult indeed for any of us to tell our 
real inner creed. That creed is the creed 
that finds expression in life. It is the state- 
ment of those assumptions that are implied 
in deeds and spirit. The will, thus, has its 
creed as well as the intellect, and the truths 
of religion must be wrought out rather than 
merely thought out. And the intellect can 
formulate only very imperfectly the truth 
that the will has wrought out. How com- 
paratively empty and flat the greatest truths 
sound from one who does not seem to have 
lived them into existence ! On the other hand, 
how significant the simplest truths become 
when they are backed by a great life. Now 
the truth which so lives for a man is his real 
creed, and that real creed he can better state 
at the end of his complete experience than at 
the beginning. It is still more impossible for 
another's formulation completely to shadow 
forth this whole life-experience. 

This is not at all to join the company of 
those who wish to " rule the doctrinal element 
out of their religion." It is quite a different 
thing from that to insist that only the whole 
mind can reach the essential meaning of 
things ; that all Christian doctrine looks 
directly to life, means something for life and 



1 82 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

grows directly out of life ; that no series of 
propositions can possibly set forth the whole 
meaning of the Christian life; and that the 
acceptance of any set of propositions is not 
the acceptance of Christianity. Thinking 
there must be, earnest and hard, and every 
possible attempt to express the fullest results 
of this thinking in ordered statement of doc- 
trine — to reach a comprehensive intellectual 
unity that shall bring our religious beliefs 
into relation to all the rest of our thinking. 
All this is highly important and helpful. 
But even so, doctrine is means, not end ; an 
expression of life rather than life itself. The 
intellect serves life but may not dominate it. 

Complete uniformity of belief and statement 
therefore is impossible, first of all, because we 
are none of us really able to make an accu- 
rate statement even of our own creed. It is 
impossible also because if two persons should 
agree in adopting the same formula of words, 
even these same words must be interpreted 
out of different inheritances, training, environ- 
ment and experiences, and the emphasis and 
meaning will change accordingly; and they 
will change even in the same individual from 
time to time. Unalterable doctrine is thus 
impossible. Any true acceptance of a creed 



THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 183 

involves every time a kind of creative activity 
on the part of the individual affirming the 
confession. This means that the different 
temperament, the different point of view, 
and the different emphasis cannot help affect- 
ing every man's creed. It is true of a man's 
creed as of his environment that the only 
effective portions are those to which he 
attends ; and the points of attention vary 
from time to time. 

VI 

Complete Uniformity of Belief and 
Statement Undesirable 

But it is not only true that complete uni- 
formity of belief and statement is impossible, 
it is equally true that, were it attainable, it 
would be undesirable. We are dealing with 
those truths that have to do with the infinite 
God himself, and with human relations to 
that infinite God. We can only approximate 
to the infinite truth so sought by seeking from 
every soul the most honest expression of his 
experience and so sharing our experiences with 
each other. The situation is like that illus- 
trated by Leibnitz's figure of the mirrors sur- 
rounding the market-place. Each mirror gives 



1 84 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

its reflection from one point of view, and it is 
only by combining all these reflections that 
the complete view of all the aspects of the 
market-place could result. We need indis- 
pensably the supplementing help that comes 
from sharing in the best vision of other souls. 
And when one thinks how it is that the 
truth makes progress in the world, he finds 
another reason for not desiring uniformity of 
statement in religious belief. For the truth 
comes, in any case, not by all the others 
giving way to some single authoritative state- 
ment, but by each bringing honestly and care- 
fully his own matured conviction, in order 
that out of all these presentations there may 
come a larger result than any one brought to 
the conference. Any one of us can hope to 
make progress in the truth only so far as he 
can increasingly supplement his own view by 
some participation in those of others. From 
this point of view, the union of Christians, 
so far as creedal statements are concerned, 
should be much like that of a group of scien- 
tific workers ; they are united in the pursuit 
of the truth. The one essential is loyalty to 
the truth — utterly honest observation and 
report, with no careless echoing of another. 
Such agreement as then results has genuine 



THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 185 

significance. But it in turn is regarded as no 
final goal. These scientific workers seek a 
series of progressively successful attempts to 
formulate the world they study. Their union 
is in this one aim. Should not the union of 
Christians, so far as their creedal statements 
are concerned, be similarly conceived ? 

And in the realm of morals and religion it 
Is peculiarly important that uniformity should 
not be sought, because in this realm, above 
all, we cannot and we must not simply repeat 
one another. My confession of my faith 
must be honestly and vitally my own. Re- 
ligious doctrines are an expression of life 
already present, and they are of value only 
so. If my creedal statement is not an honest 
expression of conviction growing out of life, 
it is a hindrance rather than a help, even to my 
own life; for, as a great German theologian 
has said, "conscious untruth tends to drive 
from Christ." And every untrue testimony 
of such a kind tends also to mislead others. 

For every one of these reasons, it is not 
desirable to check the expression of religious 
faith in constantly revised statement of belief, 
nor to forbid theories. If the fellowship of the 
united church is to be highly significant and 
capable of growing enrichment, it must be 



1 86 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

honestly representative of the full sweep of 
the growing experience of all Christians. It 
can be this only if it refuses to prescribe uni- 
formity, and admits to its fellowship the differ- 
ing members and differing functions, and so 
realizes Paul's ideal of us all as members one 
of another. 

VII 

Our Real Unity in Our Common Life in 

Christ 

It becomes, thus, increasingly clear where 
our real unity lies ; namely, in the common life 
we share, in the common experience we have, 
in the common revelation of God in Christ, 
and in the common surrender to it. The best 
analogy of our religious faith is to be found 
in what the same great personality may mean 
to different people. Our entire emphasis, 
therefore, is to be laid on the word Christian. 
Our solution of Christian fellowship even in 
the realm of creedal statement is thus not by 
abstraction but by concreteness ; not by false 
simplicity, but by living fullness ; not by rela- 
tion to propositions, but by relation to facts. 
All our confessions of faith must come back 
to an experience like that that Paul had in 
mind when he wrote : "When it was the good 



THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 187 

pleasure of God to reveal his Son in me." 
The revelation is of God, it is through Christ, 
and it is in me. This, in some form, is re- 
flected in every Christian experience and in 
every Christian confession of faith. It is the 
primal confession, that comes out in the primi- 
tive baptismal formula and benediction of the 
New Testament. We shall come together, as 
we more and more truly confess Christ, as 
our creedal statements conform more and 
mor€ perfectly to his spirit and to his em- 
phases. One of the greatest reasons, thus, 
for a persistent unwillingness to give decisive 
weight in the union of Christians to any his- 
torical creed, however important as historical 
it may be, is because, as Fairbairn puts it, 
^Hhe church, so long as it believes in the 
divinity of its Founder, is bound to have a 
history which shall consist of successive and 
progressively successful attempts to return to 
him. He can never be transcended ; all it 
can ever be is contained in him ; but its 
ability to interpret him and realize his religion 
ought to be a developing ability.'' 

Our basis, thus, as Christians is everywhere 
in the common life in Christ, in that personal 
relation to God in Christ that includes the 
whole man. But loyalty in such a concrete 



1 88 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

personal relation is a far higher test even of 
belief than any series of propositions can be. 
The simple question — ^^How would Christ 
be likely to think and to speak upon this 
point ?" — may do more to clarify and steady 
a man's expression of his faith than anything 
else. No question is so deep-going, so reveal- 
ing. Even in the realm of the conception and 
statement of our faith, the most stimulating 
and truly conserving of all influences is the 
love of Christ. ^^No man can say, Jesus is 
Lord, but in the Holy Spirit." We confess 
Christ. "Other foundation can no man lay 
than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.'' 
And just as in our statements of belief we 
are to seek not uniformity but liberty and 
comprehension for the very sake of a larger 
faith and a larger life, that shall lead in turn 
to statements still more adequate, and more 
truly reflecting Christ ; so in worship, in 
organization, in forms of government, in life, 
and in active service we must give the largest 
liberty, and bring all back continuously and 
increasingly to the test of the spirit of Christ, 
in the hope once again of a series of successive 
and progressively successful attempts to ex- 
press Christ in these ways, too. " It is hopeless 
to expect the Christian world to be satisfied 



THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIAN UNITY 189 

with any union of Christian people, that 
definitely excludes from its fellowship those 
whose desire to be loyal disciples of Christ 
cannot be doubted. Where Christ has already 
received, the church cannot reject. We are 
to bear honest and faithful testimony our- 
selves to what seems to us most Christian in 
these realms of worship and organization and 
life, and we are to be willing to heed with 
open mind the similar witness of other Chris- 
tians, that out of all something more truly 
Christian than any of us have conceived may 
come. In other words, our Christian union 
must be as wide as our Christian unity of 
spirit. In life, in statement of belief, in 
worship, in institutions, in form of govern- 
ment — in all alike — the one essential is 
that we should confess Christ. This is the 
one great primal confession. Less than this 
is not Christian ; more than this is exclusive. 
This question of Christian unity naturally 
leads on to the still greater fundamental ques- 
tion — the question of Christianity as a world 
religion. That question may be appropriately 
faced from two points of view : the point of 
view of oriental civilization, and the point 
of view of the needs of the modern world, as 
seen in the present world-shaking war. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIANITY AS A 
WORLD RELIGION I: CHRISTIANITY 
THE ONLY HOPEFUL BASIS FOR ORI- 
ENTAL CIVILIZATION 

From the point of view of the missionary 
propaganda, it is most important, as others 
have pointed out, that the claims of Chris- 
tianity to be the absolute and final religion 
should be clearly recognized. But there is 
another less drastic inquiry that greatly con- 
cerns alike both missionaries and Oriental 
nations ; and that is this : Does any other 
religion than Christianity give promise of 
being able to furnish a sufficient spiritual 
basis for civilization in the Orient, even in its 
most advanced nation, Japan ? This question 
is fairly forced upon the thoughtful traveler, 
whether interested in missions or not. He 
knows that the world is becoming smaller and 
more unified every year. He sees much of 
Western civilization inevitably spreading over 
the earth. And he cannot help asking him- 

190 



CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 191 

self : In the increasing contacts between East 
and West, and under the constant pressure of 
Western education, can the earlier religious 
bases of Oriental civilizations suffice or even 
continue ? This is not primarily a question 
of missionary propaganda at all. It is not a 
question of an absolute religion. It is rather 
a question to be looked at from the point of 
view of the Eastern nations themselves — a 
question of any enduring national basis. 
And there are not lacking indications that 
many Oriental leaders themselves deeply feel 
the seriousness of the problem here raised. 



The Need of an Adequate Spiritual 
Basis for Any Civilization 

The need of an adequate spiritual basis for 
an enduring and progressive national life, the 
Orient will hardly deny. And the more the 
Occidental thinks of it, the more evident the 
need becomes. Modern psychology, with its 
insistent emphasis on the unity of man, will 
hardly allow that the spiritual in man's 
nature can be safely isolated. So surely as 
man is "incorrigibly religious," so surely must 
he ultimately have a religion capable of some 



192 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

reasonable adjustment to conclusions he has 
been forced to reach in other departments of 
his life. Both the individual and the nation 
alike must live finally some kind of unified 
life. Their historical and scientific and ethical 
findings cannot be permanently at war with 
their religious beliefs. 

This is all the more true since religion, just 
because it is religion, must voice convictions 
of ultimate and universal sources and values. 
Where it cannot do that, it has ceased to exist 
as religion, and remains only as incongruous 
superstition or vague misgiving. There must 
be, therefore, a spiritual basis for any sig- 
nificant national life. Every nation worth 
the while has had some conviction of divine 
calling and mission, some deeply underlying 
even where unuttered sense, therefore, of 
responsibility and accountability. And its 
life has thus consciously taken on a meaning 
and value not otherwise conceivable. These 
essentially religious convictions have entered 
like iron into the blood of the nations, to 
make them capable of what else had been 
impossible. 

The very fact that whenever men have 
gotten out of the savage stage, they feel im- 
pelled to go quite beyond the mere satisfac- 



CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 193 

tion of the sense appeal, to the building up of 
historic, scientific, esthetic, sociologic, and 
ethical interests, is itself evidence of such ideal 
thirsts in men, as can find their natural cul- 
mination only in religious faith, which alone 
can unify and justify them all. No nation 
can throw itself with all its soul into a national 
task, without at least some half conscious 
faith that the work so undertaken is not to be 
allowed vainly to disappear, but will be 
caught up into the enduring life of the world. 
No nation can set itself whole-heartedly to the 
all-round betterment of its moral life, with- 
out faith that ^^the universe is on the side of 
the will" in this endeavor. Convictions, 
thus, intrinsically religious, logically underlie 
all the ideal achievements and endeavors of 
the nation as well as of the individual. 
Eucken is only expressing a widely prevalent 
and growing faith, when he insists that, how- 
ever far advanced the externals of a civiliza- 
tion may be, there are needed, as indispen- 
sable, great spiritual convictions if the life, 
whether of individual or of nation, is at all to 
have real meaning and value. And Troeltsch 
has recently voiced his matured belief that, 
even in the very midst of the most developed 
Western civilization, the inner spiritual faith 



194 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

of Protestantism is required to preserve even 
there a true and free individualism. 

II 

The Increasing Sense of Need of a New 
Spiritual Basis for Oriental Civili- 
zation 

This much, perhaps, it has been worth while 
to say regarding the imperative need of a 
spiritual basis for any civilization worthy the 
name. That many of the most thoughtful 
in the Oriental nations share this conviction 
is manifest. Multitudinous religious adjust- 
ments in modern Hinduism in India, and 
evidences of religious unrest and of waning 
faith in the older religions in China and Japan, 
bear witness. Count Okuma's testimony in a 
recent number of the International Review of 
Missions^ and the calling of the Conference of 
the three religions by the Japanese Minister 
of Home Affairs, particularly show how press- 
ing the religious problem is felt to be in Japan, 
where Western education has been most fully 
welcomed. It is fitting, therefore, that we 
should have Japan especially in mind as we 
further face the question of this chapter. 
It is beyond all peradventure clear that 



CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 195 

Japan's older civilization, like that of all an- 
cient exclusive states, had a distinct religious 
basis that was definitely avowed, was for the 
time singularly effective, and was of the very 
essence of the nation's life. What Mommsen 
says of the ancient exclusive states of Europe 
was even more emphatically true of Japan. 
Japan is perhaps unique in having kept this 
peculiar kind of religious basis down to the 
present day. This very fact makes Japan's 
problem all the more critical ; for she has been 
attempting to bring over into this age of 
modern science, of historical criticism, and 
of the social consciousness, the naive faith in 
divine progenitors that characterized the far 
different ancient world. Is it possible that 
such a religious basis should remain effective 
or even continue at all ? 

Nothing seemed to the writer so infinitely 
pathetic in the Orient, as to see a gifted and 
powerful nation like Japan trying to build its 
national life upon the foundation of the Em- 
peror cult. The faith had to have an element 
of the hysterical in it, to make it seem real at 
all. A man of Western training simply can- 
not persuade himself that the attempt can 
finally prove anything but futile. The foun- 
dation is already honeycombed. It can even 



196 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

seem to continue only by insisting on the 
divine inspiration of the imperial rescript on 
education and similar pronouncements of the 
Emperor, and by practically forbidding Japa- 
nese historians to speak the truth about early 
Japanese history. And it attempts, more- 
over, a spiritual basis for Japanese national 
life that can, in the nature of the case, have 
no appeal outside of Japan itself. Now no 
modern nation, with the present unifying of 
the world, can rest in a religion that contains 
no possibility of becoming universal. A re- 
ligion that does not fit man as man can have 
no future. It can only remain a wonder that 
there has continued so long even a semblance 
of spiritual foundation for Japanese civiliza- 
tion in the Emperor cult. Thoughtful Japa- 
nese have not awakened too soon to the im- 
perative religious need of their national life. 

For the outstanding fact in the Orient is 
that Western education is inevitably pressing 
in upon the East. That Western education 
brings irrevocably at least three things : 
modern science, historical criticism, and some 
measure of the social consciousness of the 
Western world. Every one of these necessa- 
rily tends steadily to disintegrate the present 
religious basis of Japanese national life. Here 



CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 197 

are involved new standards and new tests 
that nothing in the present-day world can 
wholly evade. In the end the pressure of 
Western education upon the leaders of Japan's 
national life must mean either the giving up 
of any really spiritual basis for their national 
civilization, or the insistent demand for a 
religion that can squarely and unequivocally 
meet these tests of modern science, of his- 
torical criticism, and of an awakening social 
consciousness. 

At this point, it should not be forgotten 
that there has never been a concerted move- 
ment to introduce into the Orient, Western 
civilization as a whole. That civilization has 
spread into the East, along two widely sepa- 
rated lines — the commercial and the mission- 
ary. It was originally introduced into Japan 
for commercial ends and by force, and so, as 
it were, only incidentally and very partially. 
The missionary movement supplemented the 
commercial movement for the unselfish end 
of sharing its religious best with the Orient. 
Under the commercial pressure, the Orient, 
and Japan especially, were forced to take on 
Western education in at least its technological 
features or suffer indefinite exploitation from 
the West. The Western education so taken 



198 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

on, has tended, thus, almost inevitably to be 
not only purely secular, but to be largely 
devoid of any of the more ideal elements of 
Western civilization, as Heam strikingly tes- 
tifies. The eflFect upon religious faith has 
tended to be all the more disintegrating. 
The missionary influence has helped those 
whom it has reached to some knowledge of 
the essentially spiritual factors in Western 
civilization. But it has naturally not been 
able to give to the Japanese as a nation a 
really unified conception of Western civiliza- 
tion as a whole. The total result is that 
Western civilization in its entirety can hardly 
be said yet to have been naturalized in Japan. 
Its most essential and basic spiritual factors 
are appreciated and welcomed, it must be 
feared, by comparatively few. 

From the point of view simply of civiliza- 
tion, therefore, one must rejoice that the mis- 
sionary movement has accompanied the com- 
mercial in the advance of the West on the 
East; for it insures at least that Western 
civilization shall not be quite misrepresented, 
and shall not wholly fail to share its best 
with the East. From the same point of view, 
too, the West can hardly shake ofi^ a keen 
sense of moral obligation to the East. It has 



CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 199 

forced upon the Orient the lower and material 
side of its civilization ; it has brought an 
education that has increasingly tended to dis- 
integrate the older religious faiths, and so to 
cut under the former religious foundations of 
the State ; it has pressed questions that Orien- 
tal religions cannot answer. Now for these 
very reasons, it is bound to do all it can, to 
make good the damage. It must share with 
the Orient its highest as well. 

Ill 

The Necessary Threefold Test of the 
Religious Basis of a Modern Civili- 
zation 

The religion that is to meet the need of the 
Orient, and especially of Japan, in the crisis 
brought upon her by this forced contact with 
Western civilization, must be that religion 
that is best able to meet these new tests of 
the scientific spirit and method, of historical 
criticism, and of the social consciousness. 
What are the probabilities that any other 
religion than the Christian can meet this need ? 
Can any of the older faiths do it ? Can the 
Emperor cult or Shinto as a whole, or Bud- 
dhism or Confucianism, do it ? Can a modern 
syncretism do it ? 



200 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

1. It seems plain, for the reasons already 
given, that the Emperor cult is doomed, so far 
as its ability to furnish a religious basis for 
Japan's national life is concerned. The re- 
ligious efforts now making in Japan them- 
selves indicate growing conviction upon that 
point. Can a return to Shinto as a whole do 
more ? The Japanese government has itself 
pronounced judgment, in view of issues pre- 
viously raised by Japanese Christians, that 
Shinto is not itself strictly a religion, so far as 
the government has employed it, nor to be so 
interpreted. Such a pronouncement could be 
possible at all, only because the religious ele- 
ment in Shinto was so generally felt to be 
exceedingly tenuous. When one adds Aston's 
deliberate judgment, that Shinto has had 
^'hardly anything in the shape of a code of 
morals," one would have to deny to Japan 
any modern consciousness at all to believe 
that she could remain satisfied with such a 
religious basis. Japan's intense race loyalty 
may give seeming vitality to such a basis in 
its native religion for a time, but it were an 
insult to Japan to believe that this basis can 
long prove satisfactory. 

2. Can its borrowed religions. Buddhism 
and Confucianism, satisfy the need ? And 



CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 201 

that question means, it is to be remembered 
once more, Can they be wrought into any 
consistent and organic unity with those fea- 
tures of Western education that in some degree 
Japan has felt obliged to accept — with the 
scientific spirit and method, with historical 
criticism, and with the social consciousness ? 
For, although it is quite true that these features 
of Western education have hardly penetrated 
the mass of the Japanese people, the educated 
leaders have felt them, in many cases deeply, 
and they cannot ignore or evade their demands. 
No religion, certainly, is going to furnish a safe 
spiritual basis for a nation's life that cannot 
command the whole-hearted intellectual and 
moral respect of its educated leaders. 

Can Confucianism or Buddhism do that? 
One may confess a hearty admiration for the 
high ethical quality of Confucianism, and yet be 
confident that it cannot furnish a sufficient re- 
ligious basis for Japan's civilization. By all 
means let the full value of its ethical inheritance 
be retained by the Japanese ; but a religious 
basis for its national life Confucianism cannot 
give. For it has become increasingly clear in 
recent years that in the mind of Confucius 
himself, it was not in any strictness a religion, 
but a system of ethics, and a system of ethics. 



202 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

moreover, rather narrowly adapted to the 
Chinese. Confucianism has never satisfied 
China's religious needs. It gives still less 
promise of satisfying the religious needs of 
another nation. 

May it be hoped that Buddhism could suc- 
ceed better ? It has had a large place in 
Japan's life. It is alive and active. It has 
shown some capacity for ethical adjustment 
to the modern world. It has in Buddha him- 
self one of the world's outstanding personali- 
ties. Nevertheless, it is hardly too much to 
say, that the native ideals of Buddhism, 
whether original or later, are precisely those 
not adapted to form the foundation of the 
civilization of a modern state. Buddhism is 
at bottom so completely pessimistic, other- 
worldly and antisecular in its ideals, that it 
cannot naturally provide the motives for a 
progressive modern state. Some adjustment 
it can make. Certain important virtues it 
can emphasize. But it must remain un- 
naturalized in any truly modern civilization. 
And all this, quite independent of the havoc 
that historical criticism and modern science 
must make in its traditions, its abandonment 
of original Buddhism, and its world view. 

3. Can, then, a new religious syncretism 



CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 203 

avail ? The history of such attempts does 
not encourage hope of a successful issue. 
One may most deeply sympathize with those 
earnest Japanese leaders who are seeking 
eclectically to build up some new religious 
basis for their national religious life, and yet 
doubt whether the movement can succeed, if 
the attempt is to be to make a really new 
religion. One feels that a religion that is to 
abide must have the vitality of an organic 
growth, and can hardly be manufactured to 
order. But in another sense — as an honest 
Japanese interpretation of essential historical 
Christianity — it is quite possible that the 
movement may attain a large and genuine 
success. 

If the Japanese do not intend to insist on 
inventing a new religion for themselves, there 
would seem to be every reason for building 
deliberately and thoughtfully on historical 
Christianity. If Japan's taking on of modern 
civilization and its basic educational ideas is 
justified at all, the natural corollary is the 
adoption of that religion that so permeates 
the best of Western civilization and has made 
no small part of its intellectual, economic, and 
humanitarian conquests possible, through its 
emphasis on freedom of conscience and so on 



204 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

freedom of initiative and freedom of inves- 
tigation. We call it naturally a Christian 
civilization. 

In a very true sense, the Christian religion 
may be said to have proved to be a survival 
of the fittest. It has already been thoroughly 
tested out in the Occident, in the face of 
all the questions now raised in Japan. It has 
amply proved its ability, not merely to exist 
in the modern world, and not merely to 
adjust itself to such a world, but to furnish 
foundation, motives, standards, and ideals, in- 
dispensable to any enduring civilization. It 
is a religion, the best born in the East, and 
the best that the West could embrace, and it 
remains the best the West in turn has to offer 
to the East. It would seem the part of plain 
wisdom for Japan to take advantage of the 
results of this long historical testing out of 
Christianity in the Occident, with its civiliza- 
tion now spreading over the world, and not to 
insist on attempting instead a new experiment 
necessarily much more limited in every way. 

Moreover, a religious syncretism is doomed 
to failure at the most vital point. Men need 
to be able to believe concerning their religion 
that it is not a mere man-made product. 
They need indubitable assurance that God 



CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 205 

has been at work in the world, that he has 
not left himself without witness, but has so 
revealed himself as to call out irrevocable 
love and trust. An historical religion has 
here a priceless advantage, if its historical 
facts are certain enough and great and sig- 
nificant enough. For men need to be sure 
that they are seeking not merely a God of 
their own dreams and imaginings and specu- 
lations, but the God of the real world, con- 
cretely, indubitably revealed. 

IV 

Only Christianity Can Meet these Tests 
AND Furnish an Adequate Spiritual 
Basis for the Modern Civilization 
OF THE Orient 

Now, it is because of what Christianity has 
here to offer in the life and teaching and per- 
sonality of Jesus, that it has a matchless 
claim on the attention of thoughtful men 
seeking a real religious basis for their own 
lives and for their nation's civilization. The 
great facts of the world are the great persons 
of the world. No other facts can throw such 
light upon the nature of the Power back of 
the world. The personality of Jesus is great 



2o6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

enough, and alone great enough, to give an 
adequate and final religious basis to life, per- 
sonal or national. Christianity's greatest 
riches lie just here. 

And Christianity has proved its ability to 
meet specifically the tests of modern education 
already mentioned. It has learned, in the 
first place, that it has no possible quarrel 
with modern science, so long as it remains 
science, and does not undertake — what lies 
quite outside its self-imposed realm — the 
interpretation of ultimate meanings. Chris- 
tianity can even rather rejoice in the way in 
which modem science has enormously in- 
creased the resources of power and wealth 
and knowledge available for ideal ends ; in 
the challenge that it thus brings to all the 
ideal forces ; in the better vision it has brought 
of a world enlarged, unified, evolving, and law 
abiding; in its gift of a method of scientific 
mastery of fields of endeavor, and so of the 
hope of mighty achievements for the better- 
ment of humanity ; and in the bringing in of 
the scientific spirit itself, with its demand in 
this whole most impressive field of modern 
thought for a fundamental moral quality — 
that of utter open-minded honesty. In all 
this, Christianity can earnestly rejoice ; for it 



CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 207 

would be difficult to find anywhere in history 
so close a parallel to the modern demand 
for the scientific spirit as in Jesus' persistent 
call to absolute inner integrity of life. The 
passion for reality is indubitably his. And 
Christianity welcomes the light modern science 
is throwing upon the laws of nature and of 
human life, as light upon the methods and 
purposes of the Creator, and as pointing to 
the ways in which men may intelligently and 
unselfishly cooperate with God in his all- 
embracing plans for men. 

In the second place, although Christianity as 
an historical religion has naturally been sensi- 
tive to the movements of historical criticism, 
and in some of its representatives has often 
protested against the whole attempt thus to 
scrutinize sources and origins ; still its clearest- 
sighted leaders have certainly now learned 
that the movement that at first sight seemed 
so threatening, has in the end greatly helped 
it to use its own Scriptures more intelligently, 
to make an indispensable discrimination be- 
tween the temporary and the permanent, and 
so saved it from forcing incongruities of 
various kinds on modern trained minds. 
Seventy-five years of the most searching 
criticism, too, have made it clear that the 



2o8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

life of Jesus cannot be taken away from the 
world, nor its vital significance diminished. 
A single indication of this can be found in 
Professor Loof's recent book, What is the 
Truth about Jesus Christ? Christianity is 
able, thus, both to meet the tests of historical 
criticism, and to use to its own great ad- 
vantage all its justified methods. In so 
doing, it only makes more possible the fulfil- 
ment of its mission as a religion for all men 
of all races and for all time. 

It needs even less argument to show that 
Christianity can meet the test of the social 
consciousness of our time. Jesus' constant 
sense of the priceless value and sacredness of 
the individual person, and his insistence 
upon an active ministering self-giving love, 
that applies the test of service to all indi- 
viduals and societies and institutions, indicate 
rather the standards and ideals which the 
social consciousness itself is trying to express. 
The social consciousness, and the true de- 
mocracy to which it looks, are of the very 
essence of the spirit of the teaching of Jesus. 

Nor is it true of Christianity that it simply 
meets the tests the modern age brings to it. 
Rather, as has been already suggested, in its 
emphasis on the humble open-minded spirit; 



CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 209 

in its passion for reality, so far as it is true 
to the spirit of Jesus ; in its faith in God as a 
faithful Creator revealing his will in the laws 
of nature and in the inner laws of man's 
being; in its insistence on freedom of con- 
science ; and in its demand for self-forgetting 
service ; — in all this, it is not only thoroughly 
akin to all the best in modern civilization, 
but it furnishes spiritual foundations for its 
structure, motives for its rational develop- 
ment, ideals and standards to which it must 
conform. The real roots of the best in 
Western civilization are Christian. This is 
what is really offered Japan for the spiritual 
basis of its civilization. 

Now Christianity is all the better able to 
furnish this needed spiritual basis for civili- 
zation in the Orient, and so to meet what 
Japan is seeking, because its fundamental 
spirit really demands such a presentation of 
Christianity as shall call out the freedom and 
initiative of those to whom it goes, as shall 
reverently respect and cherish the best in 
them, and as shall thus not simply prescribe 
for the Orient all the Occidental ways of 
stating and interpreting Christianity. A 
careful unhackneyed study of the teaching 
of Jesus will show that he was above all con- 



2IO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

cerned to call out in men insight and decision 
that were truly their own. He makes con- 
stantly the inner appeal to reason and con- 
science. He so respects men's wills and per- 
sons that he will not simply dominate them, 
and he knows that nothing moral would be 
really accomplished if he did. He still stands 
at the door of men's hearts and knocks ; he 
will not force the door. We cannot be true 
to his spirit, and feel that it is for us simply 
to prescribe according to Western models, all 
the forms and ways of Japan's reaction on 
the facts of historical Christianity. Do moral 
initiative and freedom of conscience mean so 
little to us ? 

Doubtless the West in its own experiences 
with Christianity has achieved much in its 
interpretations of the Christian religion that 
may prove of permanent worth for all men. 
But in the course of Christian history there 
have been doctrinal changes too profound to 
allow us to assume that it remains for the 
Orient simply to take over full-fledged any 
one of the Western interpretations of Chris- 
tianity. Rather are the facts of Christ and 
of historical Christianity so great that they 
need for their full evaluation the honest re- 
actions of all races. In such a humble, open- 



CHRISTIANITY AS A WORLD RELIGION 211 

minded, but utterly honest, reaction on the 
facts of historical Christianity, and in the 
resulting interpretation of its own of Chris- 
tianity — profiting by all that other men have 
felt that they have found — Japan could 
hardly fail to find a satisfying spiritual basis 
for its individual and national life, and at 
the same time have no mere imitation of the 
religious experience of other peoples. It 
would both preserve its own best, and be 
perfectly loyal to Christ, and it would have 
chosen the best in religion that the world has 
to offer. 

The question of Christianity as a world- 
religion not only arises naturally in Chris- 
tianity's missionary self-extension into the 
Orient, but is also pressed upon all thoughtful 
men anew in the world-crisis brought on by 
the European War. Is Christianity to prove 
able to inspire a new, a better, a more Chris- 
tian civilization than the world has yet seen, 
even within what is called Christendom ? 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE QUESTION OF CHRISTIANITY AS A 
WORLD RELIGION II: CITIZENS OF A 
NEW CIVILIZATION 

The present critical times remind one in- 
stinctively of Christ's words : "Take ye heed 
to yourselves " ; for those words were spoken 
at a time of world crisis, when a new civi- 
lization was dawning, with new ideals and 
standards rooting in Christ's revolutionary 
sense of the value of every man. The coun- 
sel therefore was no crass exhortation to 
"look out for number one,'' but rather: 
Be sure that you possess the qualities that are 
needed in the new civilization, the qualities 
which will help to bring on that new civiliza- 
tion apace, "Take ye heed to yourselves," 
therefore. Don't mistake the seriousness 
of the crisis. Don't sell out to the old forces. 
Don't just let things drift. Don't lose faith 
in the world's better possibilities. Be citi- 
zens of a new civilization. 

In like manner, we can hardly mistake the 
conviction that we too are now living at a 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 213 

world crisis, in the midst of a war incom- 
parably the most terrible the world has ever 
seen, when great changes impend. A trained 
American historical scholar wrote me re- 
cently : "All my historical study convinces 
me that we are living through one of the 
crucially decisive ages in world history, and 
that old things are passing away and all 
things are becoming new.'' To like effect 
the distinguished Italian historian Ferrero 
testifies to the presence of "one of those grand 
crises in history which from time to time 
devastate a part of the world and modify the 
march of civilization ; one of those crises 
which cut with one violent blow the Gor- 
dian knot of difficulties that have been accu- 
mulating little by little for generations, and 
that have become otherwise insoluble by 
their complexity." 

Now, if anything like this be true^ it 
mightily concerns all who have any care for 
humanity, any care for a better civilization, 
any care for some true realization of the 
Kingdom of God on earth, that, so far as in 
them lies, the monstrous and heart-breaking 
price of this scientifically demoniacal war 
shall not have been paid in vain. We have 
no right to become calloused to the ugliness 



214 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

and frightfulness of this worst of wars, nor 
to the immeasurable toll it is demanding, 
in physical suffering and mental anguish on 
the part of both combatants and non-com- 
batants — women and little children ; in the 
dire maiming of body and mind for untold 
thousands — 50,000 French soldiers, for 
example, blinded for life ; in the blotting out 
of fathers and husbands and sons, until one 
becomes sick in the reckoning ; — nor this 
alone, but also — in the striking down of 
divinely endowed leaders in scientific inves- 
tigation, in art and music and poetry, in 
every field of human endeavor and progress ; 
in the slaughter of the choicest youth of all 
the belligerent nations, and of the small 
picked number of university trained men, 
from whom the leaders of the nations natu- 
rally come (11,000 such men have gone out 
from Oxford alone) ; in the brutalizing of 
men through the unexampled ferocity of the 
fighting; in the breaking down of national 
morals and international ideals ; in the de- 
liberate nursing of national suspicions and 
hatreds not to be eff'aced in a generation. 

If a man estimates that toll, and still 
thinks that it is to be taken as a matter of 
course that a like war should soon recur, and 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 215 

that its sole or chief lesson for a nation is the 
building up of huge armaments, he thereby 
proclaims himself an enemy of mankind, 
however patriotic be the words in which he 
veils his thought. For the simple fact is, 
that our generation must count itself bank- 
rupt in both brains and morals, if it do not 
succeed in finding some better way to the 
settlement of questions between nations than 
by such a world-desolating war as that 
through which Europe is now passing. It is 
the reductio ad absurdum of the deification of 
force. 

Make real to yourselves a single count in 
the indictment of this war — the fearful 
slaughter of the choicest trained youth. 
Just because of this, the most threatening 
factor in the situation after the war is, that 
the direction of the nations is likely to re- 
main so largely in the hands of comparatively 
old men, saturated with old notions, not 
ashamed to praise and glorify war, without 
large vision, and incapable of daring and 
genuinely humane ideals, who will assume 
that things must go on in much the same 
damning way, and will be contented to have 
it so. It was General Gordon who said : 
"England was never made by her Statesmen. 



2i6 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

England was made by her Adventurers." 
And upon this text one has written : 

They sit at home and they dream and dally, 

Raking the embers of long-dead years — 
But ye go down to the haunted Valley, 

Light-hearted pioneers. 
They have forgotten they ever were young. 

They hear your songs as an unknown tongue, . . . 
But the Flame of God through your spirit stirs, 

Adventurers — O Adventurers ! 

It Is a tragic thing that a continent's young 
leaders should be blotted out. For youth 
has sensitiveness and imagination and vision 
and faith and initiative and dynamic. And 
the world never needed these qualities so 
much as it needs them now. One can hardly 
help, therefore, making especial appeal, to- 
day, to youth, to trained youth, to American 
youth. For this undreamed-of slaughter of 
the youthful leaders of Europe lays on Amer- 
ican youth a double load of responsibility. 

I 

Faith in the Possibilities of a New 
Civilization 

And my first appeal to American youth is 
that they exercise the right of youth, and 
with all their souls believe in the possibilities 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 217 

of a new civilization, and throw their whole 
selves into the struggle for its on-coming. 
The one thing that may not be forgiven to 
youth is cynicism and standpattism. Are 
you to forget that the very meaning of the 
progress of civilization has been the replac- 
ing of the rule of violence by the reign of 
law ? Because delicate questions of reason 
and justice cannot conceivably be settled by 
such an arbiter as force. And are you to 
assume that the race's ideal triumphs along 
this line lie all in the past ? As American 
youth are you to be satisfied, that your nation 
should enormously profit financially by this 
brutalizing war, and count its further duty 
done by military preparedness of the Euro- 
pean sort ? Is this titanic conflict — a single 
incident of which two years ago would have 
sent a thrill of horror through the whole 
world — to mean no more than that for the 
life of America ? And are you contented 
that it should be so ? Is this world crisis 
to bring no deep heart-searching to America 
as well as to Europe ^ 

The disheartening thing to the lover of 
humanity in America just now is, that our 
vociferous advocates of preparedness, our 
Navy and Security Leagues, are content by 



21 8 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

every device to cultivate a militaristic hys- 
teria, but give no evidence of world vision, 
no evidence of seeing the possibility of a new 
civilization, or of caring for it. This is what 
so stirs any rational pacifist, as The New 
Republic says : 

What the pacifist sees is not a table of figures show- 
ing the military weakness of America. He sees a world 
in ruins, brought to its ruin by the very same kind of 
talk and calculation now being used so glibly by the 
advocates of preparedness. He sees that Europe 
thought in terms of rights, honor, armament, expansion, 
and the result horrifies him. He wishes to know 
whether we too are doomed to enter that same deadly 
circle of conscription, national assertion, diplomatic 
intrigue for which Europe is tortured. He says that 
the preparedness agitation is an old and bloody story, 
a hideous repetition of the very thing which prepared 
Europe for disaster. That is what inspires the pacifist, 
and that is why sneers leave him unmoved. He feels 
that there has got to be a new deal in the world, and it 
terrifies him to think that among those who are loudest 
for armament there is no hint of a better vision. 

Perhaps no better vision is possible, but the pacifist 
is not yet ready to admit that counsel of despair. 
What makes the whole preparedness movement hateful 
to him is that it has come to scorn a better vision. That 
is what makes the talk cold and alien to him. If he 
felt that American militarists were really rebellious 
against the system which has made this war, if he felt 
some response in them to the need of a more coopera- 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 219 

tive world, if he felt that in their hearts they cared 
above all other things for a different order among na- 
tions, his antagonism would be infinitely reduced. 

But we may well hope that upon the 
sober heart of common humanity, the lessons 
of this terribly desolating war are not 
to be lost; that its satanic ugliness and 
frightfulness, and its essential futility as 
well, will have been so unmistakably dis- 
closed that no nation can rush lightheartedly 
into it again for selfish aggression; that the 
belligerents themselves will become so deathly 
sick of war that they will be planning at 
least for a far more permanent peace, and 
for the coming of a civilization worthy of 
such untold sacrifices as have been made. 

Even the probable inconclusiveness of the 
struggle may be a ground of hope, as Mr. 
Wells argues : 

I believe that this war is going to end, not in the 
complete smashing up and subjugation of either side, 
but in a general exhaustion that will make the recru- 
descence of the war still possible, but very terrifying. 
The thought of war will sit like a giant over all human 
affairs for the next two decades. It will say to us all : 
"Get your houses in order. If you squabble among 
yourselves, waste time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits 
and shirk obligations, I will certainly come again. I 
have taken all your men between eighteen and fifty. 



220 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

and killed and maimed such as I pleased — millions 
of them. I have wasted your substance contemptu- 
ously. Now you have multitudes of male children 
between the ages of nine and nineteen running about 
among you, delightful and beloved boys. And behind 
them come millions of delightful babies. Of these I 
have scarcely smashed and starved a paltry hundred 
thousand perhaps. But go on muddling, each for 
himself and his parish and his family, and none for all 
the world, go on in the old way, stick to your rights, 
stick to your claims, each one of you, make no conces- 
sions and no sacrifices, obstruct, waste, squabble, and 
presently I will come back again and take all that fresh 
harvest of life — all those millions that are now sweet 
children and dear little boys and youths — and I will 
squeeze it into red jam between my hands, and mix 
it with the mud of trenches and feast on it before your 
eyes, even more damnably than I have done with your 
grown-up sons and young men. And I have taken most 
of your superfluities already ; next time I will take your 
barest necessities." So — war; and in these days of 
universal education the great mass of people will under- 
stand plainly now that that is his message and intention. 
Men who cannot be swayed by the love of order and 
creation may be swayed by the thought of death and 
destruction. 

To defeat, then, this giant's threat, and 
for the sake of a new and better civilization, 
we are to take heed to ourselves, to discern 
the times, to get out of our selfish absorptions 
— individual, community, or national. We 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 221 

are to think discriminatingly, and to be 
ashamed not to think in world terms, in 
terms of humanity. For if the world is not 
to lose this priceless opportunity for a great 
forward step in civilization, it will need every 
ounce of help from every unselfish man and 
woman, especially in America. For the 
energy and will of Europe will have been 
disastrously sapped. 

II 

The Special Obligations Now Resting 
UPON America and America's Youth 

And how can ^he lover of America help 
wishing that she may do something worthy 
of herself in this world crisis, — may fully 
recognize the special obligations now rest- 
ing upon America and America's youth ? 
For this war already involves the larger 
part of the earth's surface and America 
cannot help being mightily concerned in the 
outcome. She is the chief neutral. She 
is the chief and oldest republic, holding in 
peculiar degree the trust of the democratic 
ideal and trend. Almost alone among the 
nations she has been standing in some degree 
at least for the maintenance of international 



222 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

law. She is not immediately involved in 
Europe's conflicting interests, and so can 
view them with some measure of dispassion- 
ateness. The probably rather indecisive end- 
ing of the war would give her a special oppor- 
tunity to insure a more cooperative and better 
world. And is it not certain that we cannot 
longer stand aloof from the world's problems ? 
For our own life, and for the life of the 
world, we must join with other nations in 
seeking with all possible energy a great 
constructive issue out of the present col- 
lapse of civilization. No mere negation, or 
evasion, or runaway attitude will suffice. 

At one point in particular, America has 
a great and unmistakable obligation in this 
devastating war. Americans can at least 
share generously by their gifts in the relief 
of the suffering and starving, and in the later 
reconstruction of European life. Look at 
the facts for a moment as set forth by the 
Federal Council of Churches : three million 
destitute people in Belgium ; two millions 
in northern France ; five millions in Servia 
''deprived of their living and of a chance to 
make it"; in Poland ''eleven millions of 
homeless wandering peasants, mostly women 
and children"; a million Armenian refugees 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 223 

— the wreck of a whole nation. Facts like 
these plainly call for millions of dollars where 
thousands have been given. So far Amer- 
ica, though enormously profiting at certain 
points by the war, has given only seven cents 
per capita to Belgian relief, for example, 
while New Zealand, besides bearing its own 
war burdens, has given a dollar and a quarter 
per capita. It is obvious that America has 
by no means yet measured up to her obliga- 
tion here. Ambassador Morgenthau sug- 
gests five hundred millions as not more than 
could reasonably be expected from America. 
For our own life's sake we need to give 
greatly. Much of the enormous war profits 
ought to go to this work of relief and recon- 
struction. 

And when we are thinking of the larger 
interests of the world and of the Kingdom of 
God, we cannot doubt that trained American 
youth must gird themselves to do what in 
them lies to make good the loss of the trained 
youth of the European nations. 

Because, then, of these special obligations 
upon America and America's youth, once 
more they are to be urged, to be prepared 
with an adequate preparedness for a new 
age, to be citizens of the new dawning civi- 



224 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

lization. It mightily concerns a man that 
he should ask himself : Am I going to be 
able to measure up to the demands of the 
new age ? Under the law of moral conse- 
quences — of reaping what I am sowing, 
shall I be ready to take my part in the new 
civilization ? Shall I be a help or a load ? 
Have I the qualities of a citizen of the new 
civilization ? 

Ill 

The Demands of the New Civilization 

Can we anticipate in some measure the 
demands of this new civilization and so learn 
the great lessons that God would teach us 
by this world-devastating war ? 

I. In the first place, the new age, we 
cannot doubt, will have a new sense of the 
inescapable grip of the laws of God in the 
life of nations as well as of individuals. Be 
not deceived : God is not mocked : for 
whatsoever man or nation soweth, that shall 
man or nation also reap. To this all the 
belligerent nations bear witness, whether 
they will or no. This war has demonstrated 
that a nation cannot break its solemnly 
plighted word and not reap the reward of 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 225 

universal distrust ; that it cannot sow fright- 
fulness and not reap a growing barbarism ; 
that It cannot sow the seed of an absolute 
national selfishness and not reap the harvest 
of the enmity of the nations. The two 
greatest glories of the war, the splendid way 
in which the colonies of Great Britain — 
especially South Africa — have come to the 
aid of the mother country, and the unshaken 
loyalty of Germany's working classes to the 
government, — both alike go back to a fairly 
Christian regard for fairness and justice. 
Because on the whole England has been just 
and tolerant and generous in her dealing with 
her colonies ; because the German govern- 
ment had given unmistakable evidence that 
it had been studying the needs of the laboring 
classes and paternally caring for them (even 
though absolutism was served thereby), these 
results could be. Both nations were reaping 
what they had sown. 

In like manner, Germany's two greatest 
peaceful triumphs, — the large measure of 
scientific leadership which was hers, and the 
enormous growth of her commerce, — both 
go back in great degree to the painstaking 
practice of certain moral qualities, — the 
patient willingness open-mindedly to master 



226 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

the facts, to learn the languages of the 
peoples whom they would serve, and to ad- 
just to their needs and desires. This is not 
the entire explanation. There have been 
less noble reasons for Germany's commercial 
expansion that are now reacting against 
her ; but fundamental moral laws have been 
at work along both lines. On the other 
hand, the lack of the scientific spirit in her 
historians under the pressure of Prussia and 
the Hohenzollern dynasty, through the forced 
education of the last fifty years, has affected 
disastrously the whole spirit of her people 
and led to the virtual repudiation of much 
of what is most glorious in her heritage. It 
is a German, Dr. Edward Stilgebauer, who 
says in substance, that ''it is in the deaden- 
ing grip of a mechanism of Prussian make, 
that German intellect, and mind, and indi- 
vidualism, and love of freedom, and criticism, 
all treasures of which the closing eighteenth 
century have been so proud, are now pining 
away. A nation which has let go these 
gifts becomes the easy prey of unscrupulous 
rulers." The taking of Alsace and Lorraine, 
too, by Germany, after the Franco-Prussian 
war, seemed no doubt an advantageous thing 
to do, but, added to the enormous indemnity 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 227 

demanded from France, it gave to France 
such a bitter rankling sense of injustice as 
to make those provinces a thorn in the side 
of Germany, a source of constant weakness, 
and a perpetual root of national dissension. 

On the side of the Allies, that England 
has not been able to count upon her working 
classes as Germany has upon hers, it must 
be recognized, is the natural fruit of long 
neglect, and of lack of a just and comprehen- 
sive national policy for her laboring men. 
So, too, so friendly a critic of England as 
The Nation feels that it must say : 

It is a severe indictment of British policy in Ireland 
that ever since Cromwell's day there have been bands 
of Irishmen ready to risk all in striking at England. 
This inveterate and inherited national hatred, this 
settled and sullen distrust, this smouldering desire for 
wild and blind vengeance, are the bitter fruit of mis- 
taken statesmanship, persisting through the centuries. 

That almost alone among the belligerents, 
and at a time of supreme national peril, 
England has been able to do so little to 
restrict its liquor traffic, also is again the 
legitimate result of great abuses long con- 
tinued. That France has been able to count 
upon the devoted loyalty of her colored troops, 
even of her pure blacks, is directly due to 



228 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

such considerate and friendly treatment as 
no other nation has equalled. That France, 
too, has grown so steadily in the esteem of 
the world during the war, is clearly due, as 
Ferrero contends, not to merely quantita- 
tive elements that statistics could measure, 
but to an inner spirit, "a feeling of right, of 
honor, and of justice,'' which the world 
hardly believed her to possess, but which, 
"in a great historical crisis, formed a neces- 
sary element of equilibrium and of safety." 

And that this war could come at all is 
evidence that the nations as a whole had 
not sown peace. They had not steadily and 
honestly and earnestly sought friendly rela- 
tions, nor been willing to fulfill the conditions 
that make such friendly relations possible. 

These are a few illustrations which tend 
to show that this war has been a daily demon- 
stration, that nations as well as individuals 
may not escape the grip of the laws of God, 
but reap what they sow for good and for ill. 
That deep conviction should first of all 
characterize the new civilization that is to 
be. For no small part of the horror of the 
present war and its most threatening danger 
have grown out of the utterly pagan theory 
that nations were above morality and not 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 229 

responsible to God. The new civilization 
we may trust, therefore, will be a humbled 
and repentant civilization. 

2. Because it has a new sense of the grip 
of the laws of God in the life of nations, the 
new age will demand in the second place 
that there is just one road to national great- 
ness, — stern self-discipline in obedience to 
those laws, leading to a reinvigoration of 
the life of the nations in its entire range, 
physical, political, economic, intellectual, 
moral, and religious. For these ends we are 
to search our hearts here in America and to 
repent of our sins. Less than that is no true 
preparedness for the new age. 

It is not creditable to America, in the 
first place, that degenerative diseases are 
sapping her life to a degree not true of the 
Scandinavian countries or even of England. 
Neither public nor private hygiene has 
done for us yet anything like what they may 
do. No spasmodic training in a few military 
camps will meet the physical need of the 
nation. It goes back to individual and com- 
munity ideals, to many-sided self-control, 
to a passion for physical fitness and surplus 
nervous energy, and — it may not be for- 
gotten — to just and humane economic con- 



230 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

ditions, not less. Are we willing to pay this 
price of national physical fitness ? 

This in turn demands a political reinvlgo- 
ration, for failure here vitiates seeming suc- 
cess elsewhere. It is not a pleasing reflec- 
tion that in recent years civil service reform 
in America has pretty steadily lost ground. 
Are you satisfied that your nation's political 
leaders of both parties should appropriate 
two hundred and forty millions for increased 
armaments, and look not one pace beyond, 
— take no single step to eliminate the mil- 
lions of waste and graft in present army and 
navy conditions and in the pork-laden river 
and harbor and public buildings bills, and 
have no time or heart for social measures 
looking to an honester and juster and fairer 
America ? Is there any evidence here that 
we are adequately facing a national crisis ? 
''What has happened,'' says one of America's 
most far-sighted editors, "to almost all the 
recent attempts at social and political re- 
construction both in state and nation," is 
this : ''They are vitiated in practice either 
by crude administrative arrangements or by 
actual administrative lethargy or disloyalty." 
"This is the profoundly and perennially dis- 
couraging aspect of American politics. Amer- 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 231 

leans fight a series of battles over candidates 
and policies ; they celebrate their victories 
and mourn over their defeats ; but they 
never sufficiently realize that the battles are 
shams, and that the real and the only vic- 
tors are the local politicians of both parties." 
We are simply not holding our political rep- 
resentatives to any decent account. Can 
that result be regarded as any true prepar- 
edness of America for a new age with new 
standards ? 

Even from the single standpoint of national 
defense are we fulfilling steadily, faithfully, 
thoughtfully, the conditions upon which we 
can count upon a united and devoted people ? 
Is America giving her less favored classes 
great and constant reason to love her, and so 
calling out their undying devotion ^ Can this 
be true when fifty-one per cent of the fami- 
lies of America have an annual income of less 
than eight hundred dollars ^ Let us be cer- 
tain that we insure a united and devoted 
people, only when we lay deep and strong the 
foundations of economic and social justice for 
all classes. In copying Germany's elaborate 
military plans, let us be sure that we do not 
fail to learn from her a more important element 
of national strength. As Dr. Devine says : 



232 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

Her political institutions were inferior to those of 
England, and her culture more primitive than that of 
France, but she had advanced further than either in that 
process of social integration which made every German 
feel that he was an integral part of the nation, that his 
affairs were the continuing concern of the body politic. 

But if America is to keep her democracy, 
she needs a radically different kind of army 
from that ordinarily conceived. We need 
not deny the necessity of an army of reason- 
able proportions, but v^e must keep our hatred 
of militarism, and our determination not to be 
stampeded into militarism of the European 
sort. Perhaps no one has better stated the 
ideal of such a nev^ kind of army than Presi- 
dent James A. B. Scherer, in his book on 
''The Moral Equivalent of War," and Mr. 
Harry G. Traver of the Society of Construc- 
tive Defense. Dr. Scherer thus states his 
plan : 

I believe In a working army. Make the present 
Army and Navy efficient, and then take a leaf from the 
wise little book of economical Switzerland. Under the 
civil control of the Government why should we not 
organize upon the slopes of our mountains, in the wastes 
of the desert, and along the flood-threatened valleys 
great camps of a constructive army of peace, trained to 
the conservation of resources, inured to wholesome 
hardship, and drilled also sufficiently in military tactics, 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 233 

so that they would find a noble moral substitute for 
war in saving life and husbanding the bounty of nature, 
thus serving the State as "soldiers of the common 
good," yet ready also for defense whenever defense 
may be required ? Not a dollar of their pay would be 
wasted, but every cent permanently invested. Use 
the present military posts as training schools for 
officers, convert your new army of experienced engineers 
into a great band of reservists after a limited service, 
substituting an earned home on reclaimed lands for a 
pension, and you have gone far toward solving our 
twofold national problem of conservation and defense. 

And Mr. Traver sums up the advantages of 
this nev^ army system as follov^s : 

It will : 

1. Provide an adequate standing army. 

2. Provide a suitable trained reserve. 

3. Improve the morale of the soldier. 

4. Build up our great public works. 

5. Fit the soldier for conditions of war. 

6. Provide for surplus labor in hard times. 

7. Relieve one of the causes of depression. 

8. Retain the self-respect of the unemployed. 

9. Give the American people value received for 
every dollar spent on the army. 

Such a plan would go far toward a really 
constructive preparedness, and give America 
an army in whose morale and value we might 
steadily rejoice. 



234 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

And on the side of intellectual reinvigora- 
tion, are we content to have it true that one 
can count almost on the fingers of one hand 
the American political leaders and political 
journals that give evidence that they are 
thinking in world terms, and are thinking 
through in any adequate fashion the present 
problems of humanity ? Fortunately there 
are many men and women all over the world 
to-day, and scores of organizations, — too 
generally sneered at by the politicians, — 
who are thinking in world terms, who are 
definitely forecasting a new civilization and 
its demands, and are willing to sacrifice for 
it. Are we willing to come to intellectual 
grips with humanity's problems at this critical 
hour ? Are we willing to do a little hard 
close thinking, in order to see with such 
clearness and definiteness that we may make 
sure that every ounce of strength we possess 
is thrown into the scale for the new civili- 
zation ? 

This in turn all goes back to the necessity 
of a thorough reinvigoration of our moral 
spirit and of our religious faith. At the 
bottom of our national and international 
perils lies the old scandal of individual and 
class and national selfishness. This is what 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 235 

makes a change in our political control avail 
nothing for a sounder and decenter national 
life. This is what makes it seem a normal 
and justifiable thing that the attempted ap- 
plication of Christian principles to national 
and international affairs should be scouted 
as preposterous. But we may not so easily- 
escape the laws of human nature, which are 
the laws of God. This war, in fact, is a kind 
of scientific demonstration and vindication 
of the teachings of Christ in the larger 
national and international problems. For 
no even decent civilization is possible, with- 
out at least some return to Christian prin- 
ciples, — without truth and trust and co- 
operation. And no significant peace and 
greatly worth while civilization can come, 
without a deepening of our Christianity and 
such an honest application of it to the nations 
as the world has never yet seen. Some sense 
of this seems already dawning upon the 
world. As Mr. Wells puts it: 

While we have been talking of the decline of faith, 
faith has so grown as to burst all its ancient formulas ; 
while we have talked of decadence and materialism, a 
new spirit has been born under our eyes. How can 
this spirit be best defined ? It is the creative spirit as 
distinguished from the legal spirit ; it is the spirit of 



236 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

courage to make and not the spirit that waits and sees 
and claims ; it is the spirit that looks to the future and 
not to the past. It is the spirit that makes Bocking 
forget that it is not Braintree and John Smith forget 
that he is John Smith, and both remember that they 
are England. For every one there are two diametrically 
different ways of thinking about life : there is individual- 
ism, the way that comes as naturally as the grunt from 
a pig, of thinking outwardly from oneself as the center 
of the universe ; and there is the way that every religion 
is trying in some form to teach, of thinking back to 
oneself from greater standards and realities. There is 
the Braintree that is Braintree against England and the 
world, giving as little as possible and getting the best 
of the bargain ; and there is the Braintree that identifies 
itself with England and asks how can we do best for 
the world with this little place of ours, how can we edu- 
cate best, produce most, and make our roads straight 
and good for the world to go through. 

3. Such a moral and religious reinvigora- 
tion implies a third demand of the new age 
— a nevi^ grasp upon the principle of the 
organic view of truth and of human society. 
Truth comes by the honest interaction of 
many minds. And all human social values 
require a like cooperation. Scientific co- 
operation on an enormous scale has been 
forced upon the belligerents on both sides, 
and, as already implied, is likely to be so 
forced after the war to a degree never before 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 237 

true. Within individual nations, and within 
allied groups of nations, the inevitable grip 
of the principle is already recognized and 
driven home. Is it for an instant conceiv- 
able that the application of the principle 
can stop there, without inherent self-contra- 
diction ? Any full and rational cooperation 
between human beings goes back to a fun- 
damental moral and Christian principle, — 
the demand for ^^ mental and spiritual fellow- 
ship among men, and mental and spiritual 
independence on the part of the individual." 
Both sides of the demand are equally essen- 
tial. For the most fruitful cooperation im- 
plies that men need one another, and need 
the best and most that each can give. Men 
must have fellowship, and the best must be 
called out from each. 

It may be fairly said, I think, that of the 
two groups of belligerents the Teutonic Allies 
on the whole have put their main emphasis 
upon fellowship, — the closest scientific co- 
operation, though within a restricted range ; 
the Entente Allies, especially England and 
France, have put their emphasis upon mental 
and spiritual independence on the part of 
the individual. Both emphases are essen- 
tial. Only together do they adequately ex- 



238 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

press the moral law for both individuals and 
nations. Each group has much to learn 
from the other. On the one hand, we may 
not go our antagonistic, wasteful, selfish 
ways with impunity, as individuals or com- 
munities or nations. We must scientifically 
cooperate — and to the limits of humanity. 
On the other hand, we need to secure the 
freest initiative and the fullest contribution 
from each individual and class and nation 
and civilization. No nation or civilization is 
so rich as to afford to blot out or to ignore 
the contributions of the rest. To attempt 
to apply the principle of cooperation in a 
spirit of insular, provincial, or arrogant na- 
tional selfishness is self-contradictory, and is 
to go back two thousand years in a virtual 
return to the exclusive state of antiquity, 
with its absolute domination of the indi- 
vidual and its utter denial of any obligations 
outside the state. 

Certainly no new civilization will be 
worthy the name, or command the loyalty of 
humanity that does not definitely seek to 
combine the gifts and graces of all the nations 
and civilizations, whether English or German 
or French or Austrian or Russian or Belgian 
or Japanese or Polish. It is inspiring to 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 239 

think that the great conference of the rep- 
resentatives of the Allies at Paris was "really 
a legislative Parliament of eight nations/' and 
dealt with many questions outside the war, 
such as an international patent office, laws con- 
cerning stock companies and business failures, 
and telegraph, telephone, and postal rates. 
The Allies thus afforded, as The Nation said, 
"an admirable example of how easy it is for 
the peoples of a large section of the globe to 
legislate in a Parliament of nations. Who 
shall say that this gathering may not in the 
years to come be recognized as the first prac- 
tical step toward a World Congress?'' For 
the nations represented constitute, it is to be 
noted, more than one-half of both the total 
area and population of the globe. If co- 
operation on that scale is already possible, 
our faith should strengthen in cooperation of 
a still greater and more ideal sort. 

4. What has already been said involves a 
fourth demand of the new age, — that its 
civilization shall be frankly, definitely Chris- 
tian, in a more consistent, thorough, and 
deep-going fashion than any nation has yet 
achieved. 

(i) First of all, I cannot shake off the con- 
viction that in this world-shaking war, God 



240 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

is sifting out the true from the false Chris- 
tianity. His ''fan is in his hand and he will 
thoroughly cleanse his threshing floor." 
Once more ''He is sifting out the hearts of 
men before his judgment seat.'' And it is 
being forced home upon the reasons and 
consciences of men to-day that a primarily 
theological Christianity, a primarily emotion- 
ally mystical Christianity, a primarily cere- 
monial Christianity, a Christianity that 
adopts God as a kind of national perquisite, 
and an Old Testament kind of Christianity, 
— have all alike failed to stand the test of 
these crucial days. 

"It is altogether too rashly assumed," says 
a modern writer on the war, "by people whose 
sentimentality outruns their knowledge, that 
Christianity is essentially an attempt to 
carry out the personal teachings of Christ. 
It is nothing of the sort, and no church 
authority will support that idea. Chris- 
tianity . . . was and is a theological reli- 
gion." Now so far as that is true, it must 
cease to be true. That kind of Christianity 
is being shaken to its base. All these kinds 
of Christianity, in fact, have been readily 
harmonized in all the belligerent nations in 
this war with a bitterness and hatred and 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 241 

ferocity utterly un-Christlike. They simply 
are not Christian. The only kind of Chris- 
tianity that can be said to have conle out of 
this war unscathed is a Christianity that is a 
true reflection of the spirit and teachings of 
Christ, that is consequently ethical through 
and through, not tribal but universal in its 
appeal, and with an ethics capable of ap- 
plication as truly to nations and national 
relations as to individuals and individual 
relations. The Christianity of the new 
civilization must certainly learn the lesson 
which Edith Cavell learned. It is an English 
humorist, Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote of 
her : 

The finest thing she did, not only for her country but 
for the men and women of all lands, was when she put 
aside all hatred, all bitterness. "Standing as I do in 
view of God and eternity, I realize that patriotism is 
not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness 
toward anyone." We, too, are standing before God 
and eternity, and His judgment is awaiting us. For us, 
too, patriotism is not enough. Our victory must be 
not only over the Germans but over ourselves. We 
must have no hatred, no bitterness. By no other 
means will peace be "conclusive." 

The Young Women's Christian Associa- 
tion of Boston have been having some inter- 
national social gatherings during the year. 



242 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

At a recent gathering, some one asked, 
writes the Secretary reporting, 

Whether we could not sing something together. 

"Why," I exclaimed, "how can we? There is no 
language all of us speak." 

"But," suggested a French girl, "tunes are the same, 
and there ought to be a tune we all know, even if we 
have to sing different words." 

"Everybody knows 'Holy Night,'" said a woman of 
large musical ability, born in Russia, of English and 
German parentage, with own cousins in each of the 
three armies. 

She sat down at the piano and began to play the song. 
An American concert singer with a rare voice, invited 
in for the occasion, stood by her and led. One after 
another the others joined, till French, Swiss, German, 
Austrian, Belgian, Pole, Russian, and Italian were all 
singing together the same message to the same music — 
but each in her own tongue. 

If all start from Christ, the nations can come 
into harmony, even though each sings in its 
own tongue. 

(2) It should not be less clear that, if the 
new civilization is to be genuinely Christian, 
there must be in it an utter abandonment of 
the philosophy of the state as a law to itself 
and as above the claims of Christian morality. 
I believe that no issue in this terrifying war 
is so transcendent as this. For the possibil- 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 243 

ities for evil of this philosophy are simply 
limitless. Nothing can be so frightful that 
this view cannot justify it. I do not see, 
therefore, how I can honestly discuss the 
problems of these crucial days and refuse to 
face this issue also. For, so far as I can see, 
this doctrine of the state is paganism pure and 
simple, and makes any nation avowing it 
intrinsically and just so far, whether it will 
or not, an enemy of civilization, of mankind, 
of Christianity. It concerns every interest 
of humanity of every race, that this demo- 
niacal philosophy of the state should perish 
beyond power of resurrection. It is not by 
accident that the most terrible expressions of 
hatred and of unmeasured arrogance, and 
that the most ruthless destruction of non- 
combatants, including the unspeakable Ar- 
menian massacre, have come from those 
Powers that have more or less definitely 
avowed this philosophy of the state. It 
behooves us all to see with vividness and 
concreteness, just what this theory of the 
state is capable of; and for that purpose 
only, and with reluctance, I quote the terrible 
"Hymn of the German Sword," produced in 
a University town — Leipsic — and running 
within a week or so into half a dozen edi- 



244 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

tions. I do not and cannot for an instant 
believe that it truly reflects the general 
German mind, but it certainly ought to stir 
every true German and every true lover of 
the German people to determine utterly to 
destroy every vestige of the hellish doctrine 
of the state, out of which these lines are 
born : 

It is no duty of mine to be either just or compassion- 
ate ; it suffices that I am sanctified by my exalted mis- 
sion, and that I blind the eyes of my enemies with such 
streams of tears as shall make the proudest of them 
cringe in terror under the vault of heaven. 

I have slaughtered the old and the sorrowful ; I 
have struck off the breasts of women ; and I have run 
through the body of children who gazed at me with the 
eyes of the wounded lion. 

Day after day I ride aloft on the shadowy horse in 
the valley of cypresses ; and as I ride I draw forth the 
life blood from every enemy's son that dares to dispute 
my path. 

It is meet and right that I should cry aloud my 
pride, for am I not the flaming messenger of the Lord 
Almighty ^ 

Germany is so far above and beyond all the other 
nations that all the rest of the earth, be they who they 
may, should feel themselves well done by when they are 
allowed to fight with the dogs for the crumbs that fall 
from her table. 

When Germany the divine is happy, then the rest 
of the world basks in smiles ; but when Germany 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 245 

suffers, God in person is rent with anguish, and, wrath- 
ful and avenging. He turns all the waters into rivers 
of blood. 

The language is the exalted language of reli- 
gion, but the spirit wq cannot mistake. As 
another has said, it is "the genuine brew of 
hell." Men of all nationalities, on both 
sides, may well unceasingly pray that one of 
the chief accomplishments of this terrible 
war may be the absolute annihilation of this 
unspeakable philosophy of the super-state as 
well as of the super-man. There can be 
no conceivable peace between that philoso- 
phy and Christianity. 

No, if Christianity be true and divine at 
all, the principles of Christ are applicable to 
nations as well as to individuals. As Presi- 
dent Wilson puts it, "It is clear that nations 
must in the future be governed by the same 
high code of honor that we demand of in- 
dividuals." As surely as the individual must 
respect the person of other individuals, the 
nation must respect both its own individual 
citizens and other nations. As surely as 
truth is demanded in individual relations, so 
surely is it demanded between nations. As 
surely as a man must put his honor above his 
life, so surely must a nation, as Belgium 



246 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

gloriously proved. A current cartoon of the 
time represented the Kaiser as saying to King 
Albert, '^So, you see — youVe lost every- 
thing." "Not my soul/' replies the King. 
As surely as individuals are called to unselfish 
helpfulness, so surely nations, if the world is 
ever to be the brotherhood of men it ought to 
be, must not proceed on selfish principles. 
They can no more escape the blighting con- 
sequences of such a course in their own life 
than can the individual. 

The whole philosophy of selfishness is self- 
defeating, whether for the individual or for 
the nation. For the laws of God are laws of 
life; and in God's universe there is no such 
source of enlarging life as unselfish love, and 
the man or the nation that would be first of 
all must be first in service. Even from a 
merely commercial point of view, to destroy 
another nation economically, is just so far to 
destroy at the same time that nation's power 
to be a profitable customer. Legitimate com- 
merce is built on mutual benefit. To follow 
the present war with a hardly less bitter 
economic war — as many are proposing — is 
folly unspeakable, and would be once more 
to sow the seeds of inevitable and self-destroy- 
ing strife. 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 247 

(3) As an early step to that more Chris- 
tian world that ought to be, some form of a 
League of Nations to Enforce Peace is prob- 
ably imperative. America, as well as other 
nations, must give up the mad idea of arma- 
ments so gigantic as to defend herself in iso- 
lation against the world. She must definitely 
welcome such a creed and policy as President 
Wilson outlined : 

We believe these fundamental things. 

First, that every people has a right to choose the 
sovereignty under which they shall live. . . . 

Second, that the small states of the world have a 
right to enjoy the same respect for their sovereignty 
and for their territorial integrity that great and power- 
ful nations expect and insist upon. 

And, third, that the world has a right to be free from 
every disturbance of Its peace that has Its origin In 
aggression and disregard of the rights of peoples and 
nations. 

So sincerely do we believe In these things that I am 
sure that I speak the mind and wish of the people of 
America when I say that the United States Is willing 
to become a partner In any feasible association of 
nations formed In order to realize these objects and 
make them secure against violation. 

(4) Looking still farther into the future, 
Dr. Jordan thus sums up plans for a perma- 
nent peace : 



248 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

All of the intelligent constructive propositions for 
lasting peace, thus far proposed, with others crowding 
to the front in practically every nation, agree in essential 
demands. They unite in the petition for democratic 
control of governmental action ; for the use of law 
instead of force in the adjustment of international dis- 
putes — though some feel that a force, police in its 
character, should stand behind the world court as a 
support or sanction. They demand the interposition 
of difficulties in the way of declarations of war, taking 
these declarations out of the hands of any single man 
or any small group acting in secret. All have the 
demand of a concert of peoples, instead of non-repre- 
sentative diplomats known as the "concert of Powers." 

These propositions call not only for a permanent 
court of arbitration, but also for a permanent council 
for the investigation of facts of international interest. 
All ask for disarmament to some degree, and most of 
them for the national ownership of armament-manu- 
facturing plants and the abolition of private profits in 
armament-making. Most of them would have the 
Hague Conferences revived and strengthened, would 
call for immunity of private property at sea and for 
international neutralization of the channels of com- 
merce. Most of them deny the right of conquest, and 
ask that no arbitrary changes of boundary be made 
without the consent of the people immediately afi'ected. 
Those who refer to indemnities are opposed to them 
under all circumstances as being in the nature of high- 
way robbery. 

In general, all seem to realize that militarism will 
not put an end to militarism, and the reduction of the 
military control must lie with the people themselves. 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 249 

They assume that the people are a more potent as well 
as a more rational force in public affairs than are armies 
and navies. 

All over the world these constructive plans for lasting 
peace are being formed. 

But a Christian civilization cannot be 
satisfied simply to avoid war or to secure an 
abiding peace. It must look to great con- 
structive cooperative enterprises that shall 
bring in justice and righteousness and mutual 
helpfulness among all the nations: — it must 
look, that is, to something like a genuine 
Parliament of the Nations, to a true civiliza- 
tion of brotherly men. Christian men and 
women certainly must do more than accept 
this as an abstract goal. They must believe 
in it, and hold themselves pledged perpetually 
and sacrificially to back every practicable 
step toward that goal. They are to take 
heed, therefore, to themselves, that they be 
ready to be citizens of this new civilization. 

IV 

The Appeal to American Youth 

When I think of this new civilization which 
I must believe lies ahead, I am not anxious 
for our national physical safety, but I am 



250 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

anxious for our moral life. I am anxious that 
America take a part worthy of her in that 
new civilization, and in bringing it to pass. 
That will depend most of all upon American 
youth. I bring back to them especially, 
therefore, once more, Christ's challenge at a 
like world crisis : ^'Take heed to yourselves." 

First of all, with all your souls believe in 
the possibilities of the new civilization, and 
throw your whole selves into the struggle for 
its on-coming. Do not be cynics nor stand- 
patters. 

In the second place, accept your special 
obligations as Americans to-day. Be intel- 
ligent, thoughtful, unselfish American citi- 
zens, with world vision, ashamed not to 
think in world terms, in terms of humanity. 
So thinking, you will remember that no 
generation since the world began has ever 
witnessed such a destruction of youthful 
leaders as has yours. That tragic fact lays 
hands of solemn consecration upon your 
heads in this hour. 

In the third place, forecast with all the 
help you can obtain from the clearest-sighted 
and farthest-sighted social prophets of our 
time, the demands of the new age, that you 
may dedicate yourselves wholly to them. 



CITIZENS OF A NEW CIVILIZATION 251 

Be sure, therefore, first, that the new age 
will have a new sense of the inescapable grip 
of the laws of God in the life of nations as 
well as of individuals ; and keep it in remem- 
brance for your own nation, as you do what 
in you lies to guard her seed-sowing. 

Be sure, second, that the nation that 
means to be ready to play its full part in the 
new civilization, must, with stern self-disci- 
pline, thoroughly reinvigorate the whole range 
of its life, — physical, political, economic, 
social, intellectual, moral, and religious. The 
time for slovenliness of national life in any 
realm is gone. "Take heed to yourselves," 
therefore, for the higher glory of your own 
nation. 

Be sure, third, that you keep your vision of 
the organic view of truth and of human 
society, and so preserve a lively sense of the 
value of the contribution of every man and 
class and nation and civilization, in that new 
dawning world of cooperating, mutually re- 
specting nations. 

Be sure, finally, that your Christianity is 
the Christianity of Christ, of no make-believe 
and ineffective type, but purged clean of 
shallowness, of hatred and of arrogance, 
capable of application to the whole life of 



252 FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

nations no less than of individuals, and 
capable, above all, of the sacrificial spirit. 

He was shot, my last boy (said a French officer to 
Mr. Frank H. Simonds), up near Verdun, In the begin- 
ning of the war. He did not die at once and I went to 
him. For twenty days I sat beside him in a cellar 
waiting for him to die. I bought the last coffin in the 
village that he might be buried in it and kept it under 
my bed. We talked many times before he died, and he 
told me all he knew of the fight, of the men about him 
and how they fell. My name is finished, but I say to 
you now that in all that experience there was nothing 
that was not beautiful. 

Its beauty was the awful, the sanctifying, the 
consecrating beauty of self-sacrifice. Its ter- 
rible price the fathers and sons, the mothers 
and daughters, the age and youth of more 
than half the nations of the world are still 
steadily paying, in the name, they believe, of 
something more than a selfish patriotism. 
Is this sifting searching world-crisis to pass, 
and bring no like sacrificial baptism to your 
country and mine ? This is our threatening 
danger. For its forefending there must be 
the high beauty of sacrifice for the tran- 
scendent aims of the Kingdom of God on 
earth. We must be genuine citizens of the 
new civilization. Only so can Christianity 
prove itself indeed a world-religion. 



Printed in the United States of America. 



INDEX 



Ambrosius, Johanna, quoted, 150. 
America, obligations resting upon, 

221. 
Animals, suffering of, 7 ff. 

Bergson, referred to, 14. 
Bowne, on error, 15. 
Browning, quoted, 22, 127; re- 
ferred to, 71. 
Buddhism, 200 ff . 
Bushnell, quoted, 1 21-123. 

Cavell, Edith, quoted, 241. 

Christ, light from, on the problem 
of sin and suffering, 54 ff . ; help 
from suffering of, 55 ff.; help 
against sin from the suffering of, 
61 ff. ; on prayer, 77 ff. ; ex- 
ample in prayer, 83 ff. ; how we 
are to think about him, 96 ff . ; 
the best life, 97 ; the best ideals 
and standards, 98; the best 
insight into the laws of life, 99 ; 
Ranke on, 97; the source of 
the best convictions, loi ; the 
source of the best hopes, 102; 
the best dynamic for living, 
103 ; the best revelation of 
God, 105; significance of dis- 
cipleship of, 129 ff. ; Drum- 
mond quoted on, 165 ff. 

Christianity, as a world religion, 
190 ff., 212 ff. ; the only hopeful 
basis for Oriental civilization, 
190 ff.; alone can meet the 
tests of an adequate spiritual 
basis for the modern civiliza- 



tion of the Orient, 205 ff.; 
defective kinds of, 240-241. 

Christian unity, question of, 
171 ff. 

Civilization, the need of an ade- 
quate spiritual basis for, 191 ff. ; 
Oriental, increasing sense of 
need of a new spiritual basis for, 
194 ff. ; necessary threefold 
test of religious basis of a mod- 
ern, 199 ff. ; citizens of a new, 
212 ff. ; faith in the possibilities 
of a new, 216 ff. ; new, the 
demands of, 224 ff. 

Comer, Mrs., The Massey Money, 
124-127. 

Common deeper life of men, help 
from, 23 ff. 

Confucianism, 200 ff. 

Conscience, fidelity to, 114. 

Conservative and radical, 142. 

Darwin, on animal suffering, 
8. 

Decision, life's fundamental, 
109 ff. ; Jameson, iii; signifi- 
cance of ethical, even without 
religious faith, 121 ff. 

Degenerative diseases, 229. 

Devine, quoted, 232. 

Drifting or steering, ill ff. 

Drummond, referred to, 164; 
quoted, on Christ, 165 ff. 

Duty, or pleasure, 118. 

Eliot, George, on pain, 52. 
Emperor cult, the, 200. 



253 



254 



INDEX 



Eucken, referred to, 14; on 

meaning and value of life, 68. 
Evolution, "dramatic tendency" 

in, 29; as pointing to prayer, 

70. 
Experiment in Altruisniy An, 

quoted, 50-51. 

Federal Council of Churches, 
quoted, 222 ff. 

Feeling, domination by, 112. 

Feminism, 158 if. 

Ferrero, quoted, 213, 228. 

Fiske, John, on meaning of evolu- 
tion, 9; on the omnipresent 
ethical trend of the universe, 
30; on the reality of religion, 
82-83. 

Freedom, Goethe on, 162; the 
achievement of true, 163 ff. 

Galatians, referred to, 135 ff. 
German Sword, Hymn of the, 244- 

245. 

God, known through his self- 
manifestations, 86 ff. ; relation 
to, unobtrusive, 91 ff. ; refusing 
the will of, 119. 

Goethe, on true freedom, 162. 

Good, the lesser, 116. 

Gordon, General, quoted, 215. 

Hadley, President, quoted, 153. 
Harris, Rendel, quoted, 91-92. 
Hastings, Elizabeth, quoted, 50- 

51. 
Hebrews, referred to, 55. 
Herrmann, on prayer, 73. 
Hinton, Mystery of Pain, quoted, 

60, 62. 
Hobhousc, on true freedom, 169. 

Immortality, help of faith in, 

31 ff. 



Jacks, quoted, 153-154. 

James, Book of, referred to, 

135 if.; and Paul contrasted, 

146. 
James, referred to, 14, 79, 163 ; 

on sin, 15 ; on the prophet, 57; 

Is Life Worth Living, quoted, 

58-59; on psychology of 

prayer, 71; on decision, iii. 
Jerome K. Jerome, on Edith 

Cavell, 241. 
Jordan, David Starr, on plans for 

a permanent peace, 248-249. 
Jude, referred to, 135 ff. 

Kant, referred to, 39, 134. 

Law, universality not uniformity 
of, 66; and liberty, life's funda- 
mental paradox, 133 ff. 

Lawlessness, selfish, 159 ff. 

Laws, need of, 20; no eternal 
self-existing, 67; of God, grip 
of the, in the life of nations, 
224 ff. 

League of Nations to enforce 
peace, 247. 

LeConte, referred to, 21. 

Le Gallienne, quoted, 31. 

Leibnitz, referred to, 18. 

Liberty and law, life's funda- 
mental paradox, 133 ff . ; why 
this problem constantly recurs, 
137 ff. ; the New Testament 
solution of the problem, 144 ff. ; 
relation of the Christian solu- 
tion of the paradox to other 
theories of life, 148 ff. ; modern 
examples of the paradox, 153 ff. 

Loofs, referred to, 208. 

Lord's Prayer, as standard of 
prayer, 92. 

Lotze, referred to, 4, 10, 16; on 
problem of evil, 26-28; on 



INDEX 



2SS 



need of opposition, 47; on 
pain, 52. 
Loyalty, 113. 

Man's vision, smallness of, 25 ; 

nature, Christian implications 

of, 43 ff. ; made for action, 45 if. 
Marriage, as an institution, 158- 

159. 
Martineau, quoted, 21. 
Matheson, on sacrifice, 60. 
Moral character, prerequisites of, 

12 if. ; universe, the demand 

for, 18 if. 

Nation, The, on England's Irish 

policy, 227 ; on a Parliament of 

Nations, 239. 
National defense, conditions of, 

231 if. 
Nature, final forces in, unseen, 87- 

88. 
New Republic, The, quoted, 218. 
Nietzsche, referred to, 134. 

Organic view of truth and human 
society, 236 ff. 

Pain, George Eliot on, 52; Lotze 
on, 52; Hinton's Mystery of 
Pain, quoted, 60, 62. 

Paradox, life's fundamental, 133 if. 

Paul and Book of James con- 
trasted, 146. 

Paulsen, referred to, 4; quoted, 
45-46; on vicarious suffering, 

54- 

Peace, League of Nations to 
enforce, 247; David Starr 
Jordan on plans for a perma- 
nent, 248-249. 

Personal intercourse, no literal 
transfer of thought in, 88 ff. 

Peter, i, referred to, 55; 2, 
referred to, 135 ff. 



Pfleiderer, on fellowship with 
God, 69. 

Pleasure or duty, 118. 

Political reinvigoration, need of, 
230-231. 

Prayer, difficulties concerning, 
66 ff. ; diificulties connected 
with supposed scientific view- 
point, 66 ff. ; James on the 
psychology of, 71 ; scope of, 
72 ff . ; Herrmann on, 73 ; 
diificulties from a false concep- 
tion of, 75 ff.; gauge, 75 ff.; 
Christ on, 77 ff. ; diificulties 
from the supposed improbabil- 
ity of, 81 ff.; Christ's example 
in, 83 ff.; diificulty from the 
lack of a felt presence and 
response, 85 ff. ; Lord's Prayer 
as standard of, 92 ; most signifi- 
cant answers to, 93-94; diifi- 
culty of intercessory, 94-95. 

Problem of evil, the universality 
of, 5 ; Lotze on, 26-28. 

Psychology, false animal, lo-il. 

Radical and Conservative, 142. 
Railway Age Gazette, quoted, 

iss ff. 

Ranke, on Christ, 97. 

Reality, three realms of, the is, 
the must, the ought, 4. 

Religion, John Fiske on the reality 
of, 82-83. 

Religious basis of a modern civili- 
zation, necessary threefold test 
of, 199 ff. 

Revelation, referred to, 55. 

Romans, referred to, 135 ff. 

Royce, on loyalty, 113-114. 

Sabbath, the values of, 160-161. 
Scherer, James A. B., quoted, 

232-233. 



256 



INDEX 



Scientific spirit, surrender to, 115. 
Self-assertion and self-surrender, 

143. 

Self-discipline, in national life, 
229 flP. 

Selfish lawlessness, 159 flP. 

Selfishness, 128. 

Self-surrender and self-assertion, 
143. 

Shinto, 200. 

Simonds, Frank H., quoted, 252. 

Sin and suffering, light from 
Christ on problem of, 54 ff. 

Sky Pilot, The, quoted, 58. 

Socialism, the real leaders of, 155. 

Spiritual basis for civilization, the 
need of an adequate, 191 ff. ; 
increasing sense of need of a 
new spiritual basis for Oriental 
civilization, 194 ff. ; for the 
modern civilization of the 
Orient, Christianity alone can 
meet the tests of an adequate, 
205 ff. 

Stilgebauer, Dr. Edward, quoted, 
226. 

Story, quoted, 121. 

Stowe, Mrs., Uncle Tom, 57. 

Suffering, in the animal world, 
7 ff. ; four views of, 34 ff. ; in 
the Book of Job, 34 ff.; as 
punishment, 35-36; as dis- 
cipline, 36 ff. ; as defense 
against prudential selfishness, 
38 ff. ; in the light of the great- 
ness of God, 41 ff. ; in personal 
relations, 47-48; as redemp- 
tive, 48-49; fellowship in, as 
a help to love, 51; problem of 



sin and, light from Christ on, 
54 ff.; vicarious, 58 ff. 

Suffragism, militant, 157 ff. 

Syncretism, a new religious syn- 
cretism inadequate for Japanese 
civilization, 202 ff. 

Syndicalism, 157. 

Temperamental differences, bear- 
ing on Christian unity, 174 ff. 

Thomson and Geddes, on meaning 
of evolution, 9. 

Traver, Harry G., quoted, 233. 

Trumbull, referred to, 74. 

Tyndall, referred to, 75. 

Uniformity in creedal statement 
not desirable, 177 ff. ; complete 
uniformity of statement and 
belief impossible, 180 ff. ; un- 
desirable, 183 ff. 

Unity, Christian, question of, 
171 ff.; a true organic, 176; 
our real unity in our common 
life in Christ, 186 ff. 

Wallace, on animal suffering, 8. 

Warfield, quoted, 128. 

Wells, H. G., quoted, 219-220; 

on a new creative spirit in 

national life, 235-236. 
Wilfulness, 117. 
Wilson, President, quoted, 245, 

247. 
World, love of the, 123 ff. 
Wundt, referred to, 4. 

Y. W. C. A. of Boston, interna- 
tional social gatherings of, 241- 
242. 



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and its actual accomplishments, and conscious at the same time of a 
widespread unrest in religious and other circles, there is, perhaps, no 
one better fitted to speak to the layman on religion as life and the hope 
of realizing it. President King has not gone into technicalities, into 
theological dissertations, nor has he wasted time on dogmas. But he 
has applied himself to the main problem before him and has kept in 
mind the fact that he is trying to relieve the perplexities and assuage 
the doubts of those who are harassed by thoughts whose presence they 
dislike to acknowledge, but which they cannot deny. 

" We have met with no better book than this for the fostering of the 
virile, heroic type of Christianity needed to overcome the evils of the 
world."— TAe Outlook. 

"At his best in this book. . . . The book is thoroughly modern, 
welcoming all that the world offers to the enrichment of life, and it 
is helpful, intelligently guiding those who are pursuing the quest of 
life ." — Boston Transcript. 

"A large contribution to the newest religious thinking. . . . No 
religious leader can afford not to know intimately the message of Presi- 
dent King. . . . Easy to read, and if any reader is not acquainted 
with his work, he cannot do better than to begin with this book." — The 
Baptist World, 



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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Ethics of Jesus 



ClolAf i2mo, $1.^0 
Standard Library, $.jo 



" I know no other study of the ethical teaching of Jesus so 
scholarly, careful, clear and compact as this. A large amount 
of learning, sound judgment and fresh insight is here pre- 
sented in brief compass and in a style that any one can under- 
stand."" — Extract from letter of Professor G. H. Palmer of 
Harvard University. 

"An original, able and stimulating discussion.'' — Biblio- 
thee a Sacra. 

"A real contribution to the literature of ethics." — Boston 
Transcript. 

" It is the chief value of this book that the lay reader will 
find stated in it with great clearness and simplicity the con- 
clusions reached by some of the more radical analytical 
scholars." — Outlook. 

" A capital book which teachers and preachers will find in- 
valuable." — Literary Digest. 

" Valuable both as showing how much we really know of 
the teaching of Jesus and the immense value of this teaching 
for the modern world in which we live." — Christian Register, 



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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Laws of Friendship, Human and 
Divine 

Haverford Library Lectures 

C/o//if j2mo, $1.2^ 
Standard Library, $.jo 

^' By his spiritual intentions, his apt illustrations, and gen- 
uine human sympathy, Dr. King glorifies a subject like this. 
It enables him to speak out his inner self. He believes that 
the laws which make human friendships possible and endur- 
ing, apply to the proper relations between God and men." 
— Methodist Review. 

"It is a book which it would be well if all young people 
would read, married people also, and people of all classes.'' — 
Book News Monthly. 

" This book is full of sermon themes and thought inspiring 
sentences worthy of being made mottoes for conduct." — 
Chicago Tribune. 



Rational Living 



Some Practical Inferences from Modern Psychology ^ 

Cloth, 1 2 mo, 2^1 pages, $i*2^ 
Standard Library, $.jo 

" An able conspectus of modern psychological investigation 
viewed from the Christian standpoint ; it is an excellent ex- 
position of its bearing on life, and it is a lucid and inspiring 
exhortation to rational living." — Philadelphia Ledger. 

"Easy to understand and interesting for all thoughtful 
minds." — Living Church. 



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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Seeming Unreality of the 
Spiritual Life 

Clothy J2mo, $i,jo 

"A book of surpassing interest and value." — Book News. 

" A subtle and suggestive presentation of the reaction from 
materialism." — Boston Advertiser. 

" A book invaluable for the provision of Christian armor. 
The vast army of ministers who study it will find in it as clear 
an expression as is likely to be made, of the doubts which 
assail the thinking mind, and of the rational and logical argu- 
ments which must dispel them."" — Christian Her aid > 



Personal and Ideal Elements in Education 

Cloth, i2mo, 277 pagesy $1.^0 

"To the student of modern educational problems these 
addresses will be of interest and value. Their distinguishing 
characteristics are spiritual perception, broad-mindedness, 
practical good sense in the application of fundamental prin- 
ciples to current questions, and suggestiveness of thought." — 
The Outlook. 

" Every president of a school among us should read this 
book ; every teacher, too, as for that. And the preacher who 
will not be helped by such a chapter as that on Christian 
training and the revival is blind to the wider meaning of his 
ministry."" — Christian Advocate. 



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Publisbers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Reconstruction in Theology 

Clothj i2mo, 2^^ pages, $i.jo 

"The student of theology who is preparing to preach a 
vital Christianity, and, as well, the layman who is seeking for 
a higher and more satisfactory interpretation of the modern 
movement of life and thought, will find here wise guidance 
and wholesome inspiration." — H. P. De Forest in Bibliotheca 
Sacra, 

" It is a book that the busy man delights to read — frank 
and open in its discussions, simple in its statement of great 
principles, and free from the terminology of theological sci- 
ence." — W, D. Van Voorhis in the Christian Evangelist, 



Theology and the Social Consciousness 

Cloth^ i2mo, 2^2 pages, $1,2^ 

" The strength of Professor King's eminently sane and help- 
ful book is not in briUiant and suggestive sentences, but in its 
clear unfolding of an elemental truth, and fearless and vigor- 
ous application of that truth to religious thinking. One can- 
not read it carefully without realizing that his thinking has 
been cleared of much mistiness, and that he has a deepened 
conception of a truth of superlative importance to which he 
has but to be steadily loyal to find a rational interpretation of 
his spiritual experience, and a safe guide amid the mazes of 
theological speculation." — The Congregationalist, 



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Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



The Moral and Religious Challenge of 
Our Times 



Cloth, I2m0y $/.jo 

"A thoughtful work, designed for thoughtful observers and 
students of the novel and rapidly changing conditions under 
which great problems of human happiness and national des- 
tiny are being slowly worked out. ... It is instructive rather 
than argumentative — this calm, impersonal survey of un- 
toward developments in human affairs. Like the more ob- 
jective social philosophers, who go down into the arena and 
fight, this clear-visioned, secluded student of civilization ar- 
rives at conclusions adverse to the existing order. His argu- 
ment is all the more effective because of its freedom from any 
tinge of partisan prejudice or class distinction.'' — Philadel- 
phia North American. 

^' With much insight into the latest teachings of economics, 
psychology and comparative religion, the president of Oberlin 
studies the problem of human development in its entirety, as 
a world problem. Perhaps the master stroke of the book is 
the most suggestive contrast between ancient and modern 
\ civilization."" — Bostoii Advertiser. 

*• President King first makes a careful survey of the out- 
standing external features of the present life of the world, to 
see the challenge that they bring to the moral and religious 
forces, and then he does the same thing for the new inner 
world of thought . . . the book is, above all, practical, as is 
everything from this author's pen." — Buffalo Express. 

"A serious and wise discussion of the meaning of the 
present age."" — Kansas City Star. 

" Its appearance is timely and undoubtedly it will aid in a 
better understanding of the difficulties that are to be disposed 
of, as well as indicate the spirit of broad humanity in which 
they should be approached." — Knickerbocker Press. 



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